Double-storey house leaves Alex residents with no power

Residents of Alexandra will experience a delay in restoring power due to people building their houses on the electric network, making it hard to repair power faults.

City Power said they are concerned residents also extend their homes under the electric network which delays technicians locating faults to repair.

This is the reason residents of Tsutsumani extensions 7 and 8 spent several days with no electricity, City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.

“The outage was due to multiple cable faults which were located under about three informal houses built on top of the cable servitude,” he said.

This led authorities and the community to demolish two houses on Saturday to access the cable fault and repair the exposed cables.

On Sunday morning, another fault was discovered under a third house, a double-storey. The community and authorities were discussing plans to demolish the house to access the fault and repair it, said Mangena.

However, this will worsen the delays in restoring the power outage of Far East Bank distributor.

“The issue of illegal structures built on top of and under the electricity infrastructure has been raised before with the community. Unfortunately, it is not only dangerous and illegal, but delays our work when we have to repair and do maintenance on the electricity infrastructure,” Mangena.

TimesLIVE

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.