City of Joburg pleads for 3-day break from loadshedding to deal with outages caused by heavy rains

• The City of Johannesburg has asked Eskom for a three-day exception from loadshedding
• This comes after heavy rains have caused significant power outages across many areas in the metro
• The municipality claims that loadshedding makes it hard for City Power to remedy the power outages

JOHANNESBURG – The City of Johannesburg has requested that SA's power utility, Eskom, give the metro a three-day loadshedding exemption so that City Power can attend to escalating faults and outages.

This comes as Gauteng has been subjected to torrential rains, resulting in City Power receiving over 4 000 calls related to prolonged power outages. The Mayor of the City of Johannesburg, Mpho Phalatse, made the request to Eskom as the electricity distributor battles to clear the backlog.

Johannesburg City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said one of the areas hardest hit by the heavy storm was the Roodepoort service delivery centre. While City Power was working hard to restore electricity, the area has been struggling to recover since, EWN reported.

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Michael Sun, Environment and Infrastructure Services MMC said that the electricity distributors were concerned about how loadshedding was causing additional faults and stress to the power grid. The rolling blackouts are reportedly making it hard for the entity to stabilise the situation and end the outages.

Sun revealed that while City Power technicians are working around the clock to restore power, criminals are targeting the workers. On Sunday, 11 December, four technicians were assaulted and robbed by six armed men in Jeppestown, Johannesburg.

Sun added:

"Threats and intimidations of technicians are reported daily. We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe so we can get through this crisis together."

Mzansi finally sees man switching off power during loadshedding, TikTok with 3.5 m views has peeps up in arms

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In another story, Briefly News reported that a video of how power cuts are initiated in North West, Rustenburg, amused people. Loadshedding in South Africa continues at full force, and online users got a bit of closure by seeing how it all works.

TikTokker @mandisidyantyi works at a power station and showed people that he is responsible for switching off the electricity. The video completely took South African online users as it got millions of views.

A video posted on TikTok by @mandisidyantyi shows that he works at the Rustenburg municipality managing 11 000 volts of electricity. In the video, the man switches off some power units, which caused a reaction among netizens as it got 3.5 million views and 122 000 likes.

Source: Briefly News