While the rest of the country is adapting to the latest load-shedding schedules, residents of Riverlea, west of Johannesburg, are up in arms after intermittent power failures in the past week.

Resident Clint Job said the whole area was without power for five days last week.

“Technicians eventually found the fault, fixed it and this caused another fault. The problem now is every time after load-shedding, when the power comes back on, there is too much power and it trips. We need City Power to come and switch on every time,” Job said.

Job said technicians were at the Hursthill substation on Tuesday night. 

The substation serves a number of areas besides Riverlea. It caters for parts of Fairland, Parkhurst, Greenside, Craighall Park, Westdene, Northcliff, Newlands, Mayfair, Emmarentia and Crosby. Some of these areas have also experienced disruptions. 

In an update issued by City Power on Tuesday afternoon, it said power had been fully restored at Newlands, where circuit breakers had burnt.

In the Westdene area, City Power said, it was suspected circuit breakers had tripped. Operators were on site to investigate the cause of the outage.

In Riverlea, it said, there was overcurrent due to load-shedding and a team had been dispatched to resume repairs.

Meanwhile, a communique believed to have been sent by the Hursthill depot manager to local councillors explained the extent of the problem. TimesLIVE has seen the communique which said: “We have started to experience an increased number of outages due to ageing infrastructure and severe weather. Any poorly made up joints and dry joints are popping like popcorn all over. The lack of proper maintenance is starting to reveal its ugly head, not forgetting some of the shoddy work done by our contractors.

“If that is not enough, we have frequent load-shedding that impedes repairs and prolongs restoration. The ageing infrastructure does not handle frequent switching well, as evidenced by the number of trips during load-shedding periods.

“The combination of the above has led to numerous low-voltage (small individual or a few houses) outages that require to be either isolated or restored by the operators.” 

The depot was also experiencing severe staffing issues. 

“The night shift has two teams of operators working. The number of faults can be overwhelming for them. They also do load-shedding, as it is given priority over any fault, no matter the duration,” read the communication. 

TimesLIVE