Cape Town - The City of Cape Town has warned that its R800 million investment in infrastructure was teetering on the brink of collapse due to Eskom’s prolonged power cuts.
This year the City spent more than R1.7m on aviation fuel to protect its customers from stage 6 of load shedding.
The power utility’s deteriorating coal fleet and dysfunctional units led to regular breakdowns and severe power outages.
“The damage to infrastructure often leads to prolonged outages and increased service requests. Sometimes, pockets of areas are excluded from load shedding for a period to do critical, necessary maintenance work,” said the City’s Mayco member for energy, Beverley van Reenen, adding that non-stop load shedding at high stages left infrastructure vulnerable.
“The City monitors hot spot areas, but residents are encouraged to report any incidents of theft, vandalism and damage to infrastructure to the City and the South African Police Service,” said Van Reenen.
The City further said that its sanitation services also took a knock due to blackouts.
“Despite contingency measures such as (mobile) generators and telemetry systems at our sewer infrastructure, with severe load-shedding i.e. large areas without power, it is not logistically possible to prevent sewer overflows entirely, in which case the operational teams do their utmost to contain and clean up such flows,” said Van Reenen.
Over the past two weeks, the City has closed off a portion of Muizenberg and Fish Hoek beaches due to sewer spills it blamed on the effects prolonged power cuts had on its sewage system.
In the meantime, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said that the metro had activated its disaster management centre, “which will remain on alert until the threat of stage 8 load shedding subsides”.
Hill-Lewis warned that the threat of higher load shedding stages had risen following Eskom’s frequent implementation of stage 6. Unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station was also switched off for maintenance.
Eskom delayed the shutdown – initially expected to take place at the beginning of December.
“While every effort and every preparation that can be made will be made to protect essential services in the event of an escalation beyond stage 6, make no mistake, if this were to happen, it would be a time of profound and unprecedented social and economic crisis for South Africa,” Hill-Lewis said.
He said that the City had pledged to do “something” about the effects of load shedding on residents and businesses, which resulted in a tender for the procurement of 300MW of privately produced power.
Things are getting so out of hand, the City earlier warned in a statement that water services are now under constant threat.
“The City is calling on everyone to temporarily reduce our collective water use to 850 million litres per day. This will help deal with operational challenges, notably due to heavy load-shedding and weather conditions, which are impacting our water treatment plants and ability to pump water to reservoirs and areas across Cape Town. Be assured that tap water is still safe to drink, and dams are over 70% full,” read a statement from the City.
Sandra Dickson from lobby group Stop CoCT said the City was not doing enough to protect its customers from load shedding.
“In some parts of Cape Town, residents were without electricity for a whole four hours, other areas’ power supply was not even restored and they had to endure days without electricity,” said Dickson.
“The City’s efforts are too little too late ... they need to ramp up their efforts,” she said.
Last Saturday, soldiers were deployed to some of Eskom’s power stations, including Camden, Majuba, Tutuka and Grootvlei to protect infrastructure from sabotage and vandalism. Some energy experts said the move was a sign that government had lost its grip on the power utility.
Weekend Argus