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CLAREMONT
Residents ask City to cast light on issue NETTALIE VILJOEN NETTALIE.VILJOEN@MEDIA24.COM
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HID street lamps should last for up to four years, but replaced lights in Claremont keep failing. PHOTO: SAMANTHA LEE-JACOBS
hile the City of Cape Town’s announcement that it was returning to its usual full-service plan and standard turnaround time on attending to electricity service requests is welcomed, Claremont residents are saying the problem isn’t only that faults aren’t being fixed timeously; the bigger issue is that they don’t stay that way for long once they are. Alex Mc Innes, a Claremont resident, says street lights in his area have sporadically been out for months now. In a letter (dated 21 July) addressed to Ian Iversen, the councillor for ward 59, Mc Innes wrote that he had reported the latest fault, “one of at least eight failures in the past two months” on 14 July. “When you have ‘intervened’ on behalf of the residents before, the problem appears to get fixed, but the lights come ‘on’ for perhaps two nights at most, then fail again. Clearly, the fault is not fixed properly ... What is the problem?” wrote Mc Innes. Last week, Iversen shared with People’s Post that he had been told what the City was doing to address the problem but that he asked the City to put it in writing. However, the expected email – sent
to Iversen by the executive director (Energy), Kadri Nassiep, at 19:00 on Sunday 16 August – simply stated that he (Nassiep) was investigating the matter. In response to People’s Post’s probe into what the underlying problem might be, Wayne Dyason, City Law Enforcement spokesperson, ruled out cable theft as a cause for the street lights’ periodic failure. He says there were no cases of theft of electrical street light infrastructure in Claremont reported to the office of the metals theft unit. Mayco member for energy and climate change, Phindile Maxiti, also confirmed that although cable theft and vandalism are a challenge for the City, Claremont is not one of the hot spots. In feedback received from the City on 28 July, Maxiti said the City was aware of the street lighting repairs that needed to be carried out in Claremont. “There are, however, significant service request backlogs across the city, especially because of the hard lockdown period and continued Covid-19 regulations for health and safety,” Maxiti said. He explained that during hard lockdown the City’s electricity generation and distribution department was operating with 30% or less of its full staff complement in compliance with the regulations. The necessary closure of depots, in-
cluding that of the Wynberg depot in the first week of August, also affected the department’s usual turnaround times, he said. “As a result, the City prioritised critical and very essential work.” In subsequent communication with the City, People’s Post asked – seeing that neither cable theft nor repair delays due to Covid-19 could reasonably explain why the replaced HID lamps (with a usable life expectancy of about four years) kept on failing – whether the fault was perhaps of a more technical nature. Maxiti responded, saying the City needs to investigates all the possibilities around the causes of the faults in the area. “Once it has been fully investigated, the City can determine the best solutions going forward. Now that the Wynberg electricity depot has resumed its regular electricity operations, officials will work through the remaining backlogs. The fixing of individual street lights will also be phased in again over the next few weeks,” he says. He added the department would do its best to resolve this as soon as they were able to do so and apologised “for any inconvenience suffered”. According to a media statement released by the City on 7 August, the department attended to almost 90 000 service requests in the past four months, since the lockdown period began on Friday 27 March to Sunday
2 August. “Street lighting, especially single street lights that are out, is one area where we have received many complaints from residents, however, due to the continuing priority work were unable to attend to,” Maxiti said. The statement read that, before lockdown, single lights were normally attended to within two days of being reported and if the fault involved multiple lights and its nature involved damaged cable- or vandalised infrastructure, then the repairs were concluded within 14 days. “The department will work hard to bring this turnaround time down from the current Covid-19-required two weeks’ turnaround time to the one or two days residents had become used to. This will occur over a reasonable period of time, given the extent of the impact Covid-19 has had on our operations,” he said. In the meantime, he encouraged residents to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities near electricity infrastructure. “While vandalism and cable theft do not impact services in Claremont significantly, it must be noted that vandalism and theft of critical electricity infrastructure remains a challenge across the metro. V To report electricity faults, send an SMS to 31220 or email: power@capetown.gov.za. For tip-offs of any illegal activity, call 112 from a cell phone (toll free) and 107 from a landline or 021 480 7700 for emergencies.