A despondent councillor has reached out to the President of South Africa after a suburb in his ward was subjected to constant bouts of power outages.
On Monday 22 May, exactly 21 days after Macassar and parts of Firgrove started experiencing these power outages, Ward 109 councillor Peter Helfrich sent a letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa.
“I write to you from one of the darkest places in South Africa,” reads the opening paragraph of Helfrich’s letter. “A community that has faced ongoing prolonged power outages for the last 12 months. A community that, on some days, only has electricity for a few hours, and on other days, has no electricity at all.”
The community of Macassar has literally been left in the dark after a local substation was vandalised on Monday 1 May, causing residents to be without electricity for extended periods of time following every bout of load shedding since the start of the month (“No electricity thanks to vandalising of substation”, DistrictMail, 17 May).
On Monday 29 May, the issues continued as another cable-theft incident was reported and this time Sandvlei, Macassar Beach, Kramat and Sitari were left without power.
“Sandvlei has been without power since Monday 02:00 due to cable theft at Boy’s Town, Sitari is off due to cable fault,” said Helfrich. “There was an explosion in a box at Firgrove. This means everyone on the Firgrove line may be without power as well.”
He explained his ward’s electricity is supplied directly by Eskom. “These power outages are a direct result of failing Eskom infrastructure or failure by Eskom to protect the infrastructure from vandals in certain hotspots. In one of the most recent incidents, on 1 May, the substation that provides 10s of thousands of residents in our ward with electricity was vandalised by criminals. This is the only source of power for the residents in our ward and it is extremely worrying that no security officers are placed at this substation.”
Waseemah Flaendorp, a community activist, said on Thursday 18 May the community had another incident when the power was off almost the entire day (in between the bouts of load shedding). “The problem that we have lies with our local substation,” she said. “I don’t know if the President will be able to do anything about that. The substation needs to be fixed. Eskom must listen to the community and how they are struggling.”
Gillian Daniels, whose husband is a quadriplegic, is having an extremely difficult time in Macassar with all of the power outages. “My husband is paralysed from his head to his toes,” she explained. “My husband’s bed and mattress are both made to specifically work with electricity. If the electricity is off for longer than four hours then my husband is on a mattress that has deflated. This causes a lot of bedsores on his body. So we have to keep on turning him ourselves to prevent this from happening.”
Helfrich said the only cable that supplies Macassar and Firgrove with electricity has failed numerous times over the past 12 months, leaving residents in the dark for days on end.
“After many requests to Eskom to find a solution to these problems, no solution has been implemented to date,” he said. “Our residents, especially our elderly and most vulnerable, are suffering. The situation in our ward is becoming unbearable. We appeal to you to intervene urgently.”
The community members and councillor, Helfrich, were supposed to meet with Eskom on Monday 22 May to discuss the power-related issues of the area, but this was postponed to Thursday 1 June. . Eskom confirmed it was aware of Boy’s Town and the Firgrove box explosion, and would resolve them, although a restoration time had not been supplied yet.
