It appears thieves are taking advantage of Eskom’s loadshedding and stealing electricity cables.
Johannesburg’s power provider, City Power, has on Friday morning attended to at least over 400 calls from customers reporting faults and outages.
The power utility says a number of its mini sub-stations and police-mounted transformers exploded due to inrush current during the restoration of power after loadshedding.
Eskom says there’s a minimal chance of loadshedding on Friday.
City Power’s spokesperson Isaac Mangena says it would take at least two to three days to clear all the outstanding calls and get the system up.
“City Power has been getting an increase in calls from residents who want to report faults and outages across the city of Johannesburg following the rotational loadshedding period this week. The loadshedding had serious knock on effects on our system network. During the loadshedding, City Power suffered among others cables that were stolen by thieves who were taking advantage of the system being off. We will obviously do an investigation to determine how much it will coast city power, but obviously it will go into millions,” says Mangena.
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