High winds and rain could lead to increased electricity service requests

05 April 2024

The South African Weather Service has issued an advisory outlining the potential for high winds and rain over the next few days. Depending on the severity of the inclement weather, it could lead to high service request call volumes due to weather-related damage to power infrastructure, and longer outages. City teams will continue to attend to service requests in the fastest time possible, if safe to proceed. 

'While we hope the expected inclement weather is not severe and will not have a big impact on electricity services, during episodes of bad weather there is a risk of increased damage to electrical infrastructure. Damaged infrastructure typically takes longer to repair. If heavy showers and high winds are experienced, it may also impact the time that it takes teams to attend to outages as they can only attend to electrical work once weather conditions improve and it is safe to do so. The City reminds residents to only use one reporting channel when reporting faults to the City so that delays in attending to duplicate service requests are avoided as far as possible,' said the City's Mayoral Committee Member for Energy, Councillor Beverley van Reenen.

Inclement weather may thus lead to high service request volumes and longer outage durations. Where damage to infrastructure is concerned, it is unfortunately not possible to give accurate restoration times.

The City apologises in advance for any inconvenience.

For service requests (please only log on one channel):

Call Centre: 0860 103 089

SMS: 31220 (Please note the free SMS service does not apply)

Email: power@capetown.gov.za

e-Services: www.capetown.gov.za/servicerequests

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Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office