The City is carrying out urgent infrastructure repairs to severely damaged electricity infrastructure in Schaapkraal, caused by repeated vandalism and illegal connections, which it says has reached crisis levels.

The Schaapkraal community has been severely impacted by the ongoing vandalism of electricity infrastructure.

The City says it is simply not sustainable to keep repairing the damage caused by illegal connections, and what’s more City staff are not safe going into the area.

Electricity teams are being accompanied by the SAPS and City Law Enforcement teams due to these safety concerns.

The Acting Mayoral Committee Member for Energy, Councillor Siseko Mbandezi says teams have repeatedly repaired and replaced the same critical supply infrastructure in Schaapkraal.

On Sunday, 12 May, our teams attended to damaged infrastructure and restored supply to residents; however, when the work was completed and teams had left the area, the same infrastructure was vandalised again – leaving residents without electricity supply. Due to the ongoing damage to the community infrastructure, the reliability of the area network has been affected as a result.

This is what electricity teams are finding on the ground in general, in hotspot areas around the metro such as Area South:

• The destruction caused by vandalism and theft is so severe in some areas that entire circuits and grids need to be rebuilt. The restoration of power in many cases is thus not an uncomplicated and fast task as it could take a week or more to rebuild an entire grid for a street or area.
• The escalating safety situation is a real threat to service delivery. The City and its contractors can only attend to service requests when it is safe to do so. Where possible, City teams are being accompanied by City law enforcement or private security when resources are available. The City is advising many of its contractors to set in place plans to be able to rapidly leave a particular area if the security risk becomes too great as teams are very vulnerable when they are attempting to fix infrastructure in some of the high risk communities.
• Repeated vandalism – within hours: For instance, recently in Leonsdale, City teams fixed streetlights and the very next day, most of the lights were vandalised again. The City is looking at technological innovations to reduce this risk, but teams are working under abnormal conditions.

Communities across the city have been called upon to be the eyes and ears to stop this type of criminality.

Residents can report suspicious behaviour to the City’s Public Emergency Communication Centre: 021 480 7700

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