City attends to high volumes of electricity service requests
27 July 2021
City of Cape Town teams continue to attend to a high volume of electricity service requests triggered by recent severe storms, load-shedding and ongoing infrastructure vandalism. Added to this, the City’s Electricity Call Centre and electricity depots are currently working with a skeleton staff due to a number of Covid-19 positive cases. This is unfortunately impacting on our service delivery and turnaround times. We thank customers for their patience while we attend to all queries and requests as soon as possible.
Larger area outages caused by infrastructure damage also take longer to resolve. These are especially caused by illegal connections, ongoing vandalism and by trees and shrubs growing into electricity infrastructure. Added to this, Covid-19 and last week’s load-shedding continue to impact operations and health and safety regulations must be adhered to in the interest of staff, contractors and customers. It must also be noted that many areas across the metro remain highly volatile. Although the City does its best to attend to requests as soon as possible, it cannot jeopardise staff and contractor safety. Electricity teams often have to get law enforcement escorts in some areas.
City teams will continue to do everything in their power to attend to outages in the shortest possible time. It is often not possible to give an exact time for restoration where damage to infrastructure is involved and where an outage affects a large area. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience suffered. Residents are assured that City teams are attending to outages as quickly as possible.
‘There are a number of areas across the metro which are currently experiencing unplanned outages. Our teams are attending to these and we thank our customers for their understanding.
‘Customers should please bear in mind that storms can cause area outages, which take longer to resolve. These are especially caused by trees and shrubs growing into electricity infrastructure. Added to this, Covid-19 continues to have an impact on operations. City teams will continue to do everything in their power to attend to outages in the shortest possible time. It is often not possible to give an exact time for restoration where damage to infrastructure is involved and where an outage affects a large area,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Energy and Climate Change, Councillor Phindile Maxiti.
Customers are requested to report outages via the City’s service channels to alert the technicians to intervene.
For service requests (please only log on one channel and do not log the same request multiple times):
Call Centre: 0860 103 089
SMS: 31220 (Please note the free SMS service does not apply)
Please note, during inclement weather, service requests increase and this can impact on the time required to fix an outage. The City thanks all residents for their understanding.
End
Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
