Tree climbing electricity cable thieves made use of overgrown trees next to street light poles in Noyce Street, Kariega, to climb to the top to cut the cables.
Every time after the municipality’s local electrical department replaced the cables, the tree climbing thieves struck again.
A Noyce Street resident, Elrico Barlow, said last week the cables were stolen for six consecutive days.
“I am furious. It is so frustrating. Not only to be without electricity, but the outage caused thousands of rands of damage to our electrical household equipment,” said Barlow.
“Even more frustrating is that we caught one of the thieves in a tree, but he is back on the streets again. I do believe this is a syndicate operating in this area. Residents are fed-up with cable theft and crime in general and it is inevitable that they will start to take the law into their own hands.”
Councillor Roelf Basson requested the parks department to trim the trees next to the Noyce Street street lights, preventing any further tree climbing cable theft.
“It is costing the municipality an enormous amount to keep on replacing the cables,” said Basson.
“We need a cohesion of local law enforcement, private security companies, as well as the assistance of community policing forums and residents’ co-operation to form some kind of squad to tackle issues like this in high-risk areas, which precludes our town from moving forward. We drastically need to tackle this problem.”
