Durban: The recent wet weather has wreaked havoc on eThekwini Municipality's electrical system, leading to a number of outages across the city.
On Tuesday, several communities including Newlands West, Bayhead, Athlone Park, Shallcross and Mayville, were without electricity.
On Monday, electrical outages left residents in Asherville, KwaNyusa, Shallcross and Bluff without power.
Last week, several outages were reported in Westridge, Croftdene, Hillcrest, Molweni and Lamontville.
City spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela said the increase in power outages has been due to wet weather. He said in cases of unexpected or severe weather conditions, there is more power consumption, which puts pressure on the system, leading to more faults than usual.
He said constant maintenance of infrastructure costs the City just over R1 billion.
"When it comes to eradicating outages, constant maintenance remains the city's best bet. To help the municipality eradicate frequent outages, customers are always encouraged to switch off their non-essential appliances that have high electricity consumption, in order to ease the burden on our grid," he said.
Msawakhe said the City's Electricity Department also does extensive research on all faults to guide the municipality in its procurement and maintenance practices.
In a separate matter, the City has advised that its contact centres are temporarily down. This is due to vandalisation of Telkom infrastructure, and theft of cables. Call centres affected are Electricity, Water and Sanitation, and Revenue.
For electricity faults, customers can email [email protected] or Whatsapp 076 791 2449.
For water-related faults, customers can email [email protected] or WhatsApp 073 148 3477.
For revenue and billing queries, customers can use this link http://correspondence.durban.gov.za:200/
Via it's Facebook page, the City indicated that technicians are attending to the matter urgently.
IOL