Power outages spark action from fed-up ratepayers

Fed up with rolling blackouts since the start of the festive season, KwaZulu-Natal north coast residents are demanding answers — and threatening to lodge an official complaint with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa).

Dolphin Coast Residents and Ratepayers Association (Docrra) chair Deon Viljoen said areas such as Ballito were plagued by large-scale, ongoing faults that caused major inconvenience to residents and businesses.

“This could not have come at a worse moment when we are hosting thousands of visitors who have come to enjoy our beautiful coastline.”

“On December 16, at the outset of this crisis, Docrra wrote to the KwaDukuza Municipality (KDM) to call for an urgent inquiry into the outages that took place across the Southern Grid.”

“This request asked for an incident and response timeline, details on technical capacity preparedness, a log of preventive maintenance, and an explanation of why communication was not more timely and transparent. A press release accompanied this correspondence, and both are available to view on our website. To date, no response has been received from KDM,” he said.

The outages persisted.

With regard to the steps that Docrra intends taking, we cannot stand in their way if they seek recourse of one kind or the other. However, our doors remain open should they wish to engage the municipality directly. 

—  KDM spokesperson Sifiso Zulu

“Our executive committee and our electricity subcommittee have been hard at work mounting our strategy to find a solution to this untenable situation. We are collaborating with all of our civil society partners as well as ward councillors and the management of major residential estates,” said Viljoen.

Docrra’s “multifaceted” approach to addressing the crisis involves:

• lodging an official complaint with Nersa to audit KDM’s electrical infrastructure and implement oversight;
• seeking intervention from the co-operative governance and traditional affairs MEC to restore accountability;
• filing a promotion of access to information act request for detailed fault and maintenance logs from KDM; and
• consulting municipal law experts to explore legal options.

KDM provided TimesLIVE Premium with a nine-page report on the power outages in the municipality's southern network.

KDM said the purpose of the investigation and the report was to provide corrective and preventive measures taken and to be taken.

The scope applied to outages between December 12 and 16 on 33kV, 11kV and low voltage electrical networks, supplied by Eskom supply points of Driefontein and Shakaskraal.

The findings from Driefontein were that cable failures were caused by civil construction works on M4 where the contractor hooked the 33kV cables, and that had an impact on the lifetime of the joints.

“A process on approval and having retention for wayleaves needs to be enhanced. The wayleave policy needs to be implemented to minimise damages caused by third-party civil contractors,” the report said.

Other faults in Driefontein included wear and tear on the conductor which led to its snapping at the tension splice. Upgrading was not feasible as this is a temporary arrangement for Eskom to supply electricity to KDM while the Dukuza substation is being established.

There were storm-induced faults in the Sheffield and Imbonini areas. Faulty protection grading and ageing infrastructure worsened the problems.

“With regard to the steps that Docrra intends taking, we cannot stand in their way if they seek recourse of one kind or the other. However, our doors remain open should they wish to engage the municipality directly,” KDM spokesperson Sifiso Zulu told TimesLIVE Premium.

Ward 30 councillor Jack Abrahams said KDM needed preventive maintenance and to fix infrastructure before the entire grid collapsed.

“We also await the report from the task team that KDM has set up to investigate these outages as rumours of sabotage quickly surfaced,” he said.