Durban - The eThekwini Municipality has streamlined its response to power outages to ensure quick restoration of electricity supply.
This is according to Maxwell Mthembu, the head of the electricity unit in the city council.
He said the strategy was aimed at avoiding an incident similar to that which occurred in the Phoenix area where residents were left without power for an extended period at the weekend.
Mthembu explained that previously there was one team which would detect the fault and another would then be brought in to fix that fault.
He said in future the teams deployed to detect faults would be tasked with fixing these faults to ensure there was no delay in restoring power to affected areas.
He announced the changes yesterday following a more than 40-hour power outage in Phoenix.
It sparked protests in the area yesterday and city councillors said they wanted to know how the problem would be prevented in the future.
Johnny Naidoo, one of the frustrated residents in Phoenix said: “We are suffering like you won’t believe.
“This is a continuous problem with water and electricity going on and off. Some of the areas have been without water going on three days.
“Our food is spoiling, the meat is going off, the milk is going off, no one is going to compensate us for that.”
Speaking about the work done to restore power to Phoenix, Mthembu said his officials did not abandon the community and were in the area fixing the problem.
“There is only one road (that was still out) that is being fixed (midday yesterday), and our teams are on site, power has been restored to 90% of the area,” said Mthembu.
He said the outage was a result of two technical faults in a cable.
He added they had attended to the fault in the cable and once it was fixed the power was restored for about 30 minutes and there was another fault that caused an outage on the same cable.
Mthembu pleaded with the community to understand that finding and restoring a single fault of this nature could take an entire day.
“When there is a fault, we have to use a machine and follow the line to check where the fault might be that process could take eight hours. Once the fault has been located, we have to dig and that could take another 10 hours, already 18 hours of the day is gone,” he said.
Mthembu said he would like to apologise to the community.
“The DA had written to us requesting a meeting and as soon as that date is confirmed we will meet with the party leaders to explain what happened and how we will handle it going forward,” said Mthembu.
DA councillor Thabani Mthethwa said such outages could trigger food insecurity in communities.
“The city should immediately consider exempting Phoenix and other communities with weakened power infrastructure from load-shedding. The city administration, including Mayor Kaunda, must accept full responsibility for the ANC's decades-long mismanagement of the energy infrastructure,” he said.
Democratic Liberal Congress councillor Patrick Pillay said it was unacceptable for the Phoenix community to be without water and electricity for days on end.
He said this problem was indicative of the general lack of service delivery to the area.