By Jonk wa Mashamba
news@alexreporter.co.za
Furious community members burned tyres and protested over power cuts.
This after City Power, accompanied by law enforcement, removed the illegal electrical connections between 1-22 London road and extension 7 in Alexandra.
The events took place this afternoon on London Road (and extension 7 near Gautrain station) respectively.
Isaac Mangena, spokesperson for City Power stated that most of the daily outages in Alexandra were caused by grid overload.
Mangena said the overload was caused by illegal connections, arguing they were also unsafe for residents.
“It is also caused by the mushrooming of backyard rooms in the township, especially across the Jukskei river.”
He said the overload had caused serious damage to the infrastructure with many ninisubstations, transformers, cables exploding and catching fire.
“You saw at 8th Vasco (Da Gamma).
So we have formalized houses and flats complaining about the outages, especially during the peak hours of 16h00 to 22h00.
“Unfortunately the situation is going to be worse with the temperature expected to dip from today into the weekend.
“The only solution is to conduct operations to cut off illegal connections to relieve the system of the pressures and avoid the explosions and other damages to our infrastructure.”
Mangena said today’s operation to remove illegal connections was for this reason.
“We leave the areas after cut offs under the hands of law enforcement to attend to any illegality, including Reconnections and protests, like what is happening now.
