Eskom meets with irate residents – by torchlight
UPMARKET homeowners from the Cove Rock Estate and farmers in the area are up in arms after a year of constant power outages due to illegal connections by residents living illegally at Bhongweni farm near the East London airport.
According to the residents, who are Eskom customers not BCM ones, the problem started last year and has affected businesses and some 247 households.
Angry residents on Monday held a meeting with Eskom officials at which torches had to be used due to yet another outage.
Speaking to the Daily Dispatch this week, Cove Rock homeowners’ association vice-chairman Neil Smith said: “We used to be connected to the Needs Camp electricity feed and the Bhongweni connections affected us because the area is between Cove Rock and Needs Camp.
“As a temporary solution Eskom then connected us to the Gately feed but even that does not help as we still experience power outages.
“We have people who are sick and dependent on dialysis machines to survive and are badly affected by this.
“They initially told us that we would have to fork out R5-million for them to connect us to another sub-station that had sufficient capacity to service our fast growing area,” said Smith.
The residents said transformers often exploded, appliances were damaged and they often spent weekends without electricity. On Monday, the electricity reportedly went off for nine hours.
Another unhappy customer, farmer Greg Elliot of Rockcliffe Dairy Farm said the outages cost businesses in the area a lot of money.
“The electricity sometimes goes out for up to 12 hours.
“We produce dairy on our farm and when the electricity is out we can’t pump water and we can’t use the refrigerators, so we have a generator to make sure that we produce milk and not maas.
“Running the generator costs a lot of money as it can take up to 15 litres [of fuel] per hour. It’s a major problem,” said Elliot.
Following the meeting on Monday, Eskom spokeswoman Ntombekhaya Mafumbatha said the parastatal was exploring other options to improve supply reliability.
Eskom’s provincial general manager Colin Reddy attended the meeting where Eskom committed to drive a R5-million investment in a proposed new line from Leaches Bay substation to service the area.
Mafumbatha said they were working closely with law enforcement authorities to combat electricity theft and illegal connections in the area. —