Following Eskom granting the City of Johannesburg a 72-hour reprieve from loadshedding in order to attend to a backlog of almost 5,000 calls caused by the devastating storms, City Power teams have managed to bring the backlog down to just over 2,000 logged calls, to date.
City Power, together with Eskom, used their discretion to decide on the areas that were under pressure with maintenance and repair backlogs to be given some reprieve from loadshedding.
We can safely say that we are on the right track in terms of recovery and dealing with the huge backlogs we encountered due to the recent floods and thunderstorms.
On behalf of the Joburg Multi-Party Government, I would like to thank residents for their patience and understanding as we battled and continue to battle with the backlog.
We appreciate and commend the help and cooperation we received from Councillors and community leaders, some spending sleepless nights attending to residents’ queries.
Further to this, I would like to thank the MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services, Cllr Michael Sun, the CEO of City Power, Ms Tshifularo Mashava, and their teams for the progress they have made under very difficult conditions.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, and the work will continue until the job is done.
We estimate the cost to normalise the electricity supply following the devastating floods to be in the region of R31-million, with overall damage to infrastructure, across Departments and Entities, to be in the region of R300-million.
It is in this context that I submitted a detailed report to the National and Provincial Disaster Management Centres in order to classify the ongoing emergency as a State of Local Disaster. In this regard, we await their feedback.
A declaration of a Local State of Disaster will allow the City to access resources from other spheres of Government if and when needed, as well as accelerating procurement processes for emergency operations.
ENDS….
Mabine Seabe
Director: Mayoral Communication
Private Office of the Executive Mayor
084 677 7851
20/12/2022
