The ageing infrastructure in Jukulyn in Soshanguve township has been blamed for prolonged water and electricity outages experienced by residents for more than past five days.
Local councillor Bongani Masina said on Monday that the outages remain unresolved and that unfortunately there is currently no estimated time frame for the restoration of services.
He, however, said while water supply has been restored in many households, the electricity outage persists, leaving residents without power.
“We don't know what is the root cause of it but we are told that it is because of faulty electric cables that have exploded,” he said.
Masina pointed out that substations in the area have not been upgraded in a long time to keep up with the growing demands.
“We know that each and every year the population here is growing, but the substations have not been upgraded accordingly,” he said.
On Sunday, Masina was joined by the City of Tshwane MMC for Human Settlements Aaron Maluleka to address the service delivery crisis during a community meeting for wards 25, 26, and 27 in Jukulyn.
The pair attributed the delays in service restoration as being due to the recent heavy downpours
Maluleka assured residents that all power outages will be resolved promptly after water services were fully restored on Saturday.
According to the City, Jukulyn has become bigger and the demand for electricity far exceeds capacity provided.
“The overload tripping on transformers has been temporarily resolved by splitting low voltage circuits in the mini sub-stations and the removal of main low voltage protection circuit breakers on the transformers,” the City said.
It further indicated that another issue in electricity network overload affecting Jukulyn is the mushrooming of informal settlements where consumers connect illegally on the electricity networks.
“The feeder cables and medium voltage equipment between Soshanguve 132/11kv and W substation experience multiple equipment failure as a result of overheating during peak periods. To avoid a total collapse of the network, load reduction was introduced to areas supplied by W, X, and V substations,” the City said.
It also highlighted that all three satellite substations in the area were vandalised.
“There are no functional electrical protection schemes at all the satellite substations, which means there is no discrimination of faults on the multi medium voltage cable networks,” the City said.