The City of Cape Town spent R7.3m to repair stolen and vandalised electricity infrastructure between April and June.
MMC for energy in the city Xanthea Limberg said Mitchells Plain was one of the worst-affected areas. She said the city had recorded more than 200 incidents of theft and vandalism.
“I’ve been inspecting sites where we are repairing damaged electrical infrastructure and street lights in particular across the metro to evaluate the interventions the city has put in place to tackle the scourge of theft and vandalism. The latest data shows a total of 242 theft and vandalism incidents reported with estimated costs of repairs amounting to R7.3m,” said Limberg.
“Theft and vandalism affecting street lights comprise the majority of the repair costs of R4.2m as public lighting is an easy target due to easy access for criminals damaging the infrastructure to perform illegal activities. Again, Area South, especially Mitchells Plain, has been the most affected with 153 or 70% of the total incidents of 242 happening in this area.
“Due to this crisis, many interventions are being driven both to enable energy teams to fix street lights faster but also to reduce the risks of the crisis levels of theft and vandalism.
“Between July 31 and August 13, city energy teams attended to 5,810 street light-related requests across the metro, bringing the total attended to in a month to more than 13,210. The city services more than 245,000 street lights in total.”
Limberg urged residents to assist the city in curbing the scourge. She said the city had launched an anonymous tip-off line.
“We’ve put more boots on the ground with contracting services and also through our energy safety teams, beefing up resources with about R40m to tackle this crisis,” she said.
“We’ve added more security escorts to help our teams attend to outages caused by theft and illegal connections. We’ve also looked holistically at this situation, replacing the copper material with aluminium where possible to reduce the street value, rolling out more underground cabling where feasible, increasing CCTV monitoring and looking at more innovative solutions that will be rolled out in the near future.
“We are also embarking on enhanced community co-operation engagements, education and awareness drives because we are absolutely committed to safer and brighter communities.”
TimesLIVE
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