Residents powerless

Frustrated residents of Reiger Park are calling on municipal officials to urgently deal with the electricity crisis in their township, before the fed up residents take matters into their own hands.

Speaking to the Advertiser, paying customers in the area, including their Ward 34 councillor, Charlie Crawford, said the township has, for the past couple of months, been experiencing unplanned power outages due to overloading and infrastructure damages caused by illegal connections.

Residents expressed shock that the brazen electricity thieves had gone as far as to steal electricity from municipal-owned property – the Reiger Park Civic Centre.

When the Advertiser visited the township, illegally connected electricity cables could be seen running from the electricity box in the civic centre to some of the shacks and an old mine hostel in Joe Slovo informal settlement.

“I’ve been inundated with complaints from residents who are paying for their electricity, and I escalated the matter to the municipality, asking them to take swift action,” said Crawford.

“However, they have not done anything to remedy the situation.”

According to Crawford, the illegal connections on the electricity box inside the civic centre and other spots in the township result in overloading and damage to infrastructure, which constantly plunges the whole area into darkness.

“The power frequently goes out as the network overloads because of too many illegally connected homes in the informal settlement using a network which designed for a paying households.

“In some cases, the boxes explode because [illegal electricians] have bypassed the fuses or circuit breakers that switch off when the load gets to dangerous levels.

“Not only are these damaged transformers costly to repair or replace, but they take hours or days to repair,” said Crawford.

The councillor reiterated that part of the problem was that the City of Ekurhuleni has broken its promise to electrify all informal settlements in the city. – Caxton News Service