Joburg Environment MMC appalled by DA’s power supply challenge

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The Johannesburg environment and infrastructure services MMC Jack Sekwaila says he is appalled by the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) power supply challenge.

This comes after what he termed audacious display of political opportunism by the DA in relation to a serious power supply challenge affecting residents in parts of the Inner-city.

“While we understand the need for the DA to go around making empty noise and pretending to be concerned about the lives of the residents of Johannesburg, we didn’t expect that they would stoop so low and undermine genuine efforts being made to resolve the ongoing problem.

“The party claims that power supply interruptions emanating from the Bellevue Substation are because of the City’s financial inefficiencies and that not enough is being done to address the challenge,” he remarked.

The MMC stated that along with City Power, they have been hard at work since the devastating fire gutted the Observatory substation in December 2023, damaging essential infrastructure and impacting the Bellevue substation in the process.

He continued; “Over a week ago, our Power supply entity City Power, issued a statement, outlining plans to permanently fix the supply disruptions at Bellevue and Observatory substations.

“Just to remind the DA of the reality we are dealing with. The December fire destroyed the entire control room and its components, which would ordinarily take about 90-days to rewire and commission back into service.

“Meanwhile, we also had an 88KV oil cable that also got damaged by the impact of the flame. That alone would have taken 15-days to repair. Given the context, a decision was taken to install new interconnector cables on a stretch of 3 km between the Observatory and Bellevue substation.

Sekwaila emphasised that this was done to significantly shorten the turnaround time and enabled them to restore power supply to both substations within seven days as opposed to three months.

He further said additional measures were taken immediately to reinstate power to essential services such as Yeoville water reservoir, clinic, and police station.

“As we communicated previously, this was used as a stop-gap measure to relieve customers. While the temporary measures were in place, our technical team conducted a thorough investigation to address underlying issues and permanently put a stop to regular outages in the affected areas.

“In that process, we also discovered that almost half of the power supply interruptions recorded were resulting from normal faults on transmission lines due to inclement weather conditions (lightning and storms) experienced in recent times, ageing infrastructure which is over sixty years old (transformer and cable faults), theft and vandalism.

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“Due to the intense nature of this work which will involve a multidisciplinary approach, we expect to conclude and fully reinstate the two substations to their original state within the next twelve months,” he expressed.

Sekwaila said their teams are prioritising outage calls in that area which they expect to persist until theye have finally resolved the underlying challenges.

He added; “For the DA to make wild and unfounded claims, knowing very well that the city’s financial wellbeing, which is now on a recovery path, collapsed in their hands, is puzzling.

“At the end of June 2021, audited financial statements reflected a city with a healthy cash balance of R6.6 billion. However, that quickly dried up under the DA-led administration to the point of nearly bankrupting the municipality.”