eThekwini Municipality

POWER OUTAGE MONDAY 31 MARCH 2025 One must ask the City Manager of Durban; what sort of management does the Electricity Department have? Does this department run under the direction of a qualified electrical engineer? If not why not because whoever is in charge should be fired for dereliction of duty The recent event of residences in Helen Gibling Gardens – Part of Bill Buchanan Association for the Aged, which was affected by this recent power outage which occurred from Monday the 31 march 2025 from 11h00 up to 2 April 2025 at 07h10 has cost many of us pensioners serious money, due to a loss of food. The question that needs to be raised is what type of people are running this electricity department? From feedback that was received, late on Tuesday that it was confirmed that they had located the problem substation. If this is indeed true, we have serious problem with those that oversee the overall supply of electricity to the Metropolitan area. Surely with sophisticated computer systems the fault at a particular sub station should be able to be identified promptly and in a matter of minutes. This recent collapse of power supply, one is lead to believe, was at a substation and then the question arises was this substation properly maintained? Was maintenance carried out on a regular basis? We all are under the impression that under the current Management, maintenance is not really carried out, their philosophy is that they would rather wait till it breaks and then try to fix the problem, instead of doing maintenance to minimise the break down time. This time line and span to rectify the power outage leaves very little confidence with the consumers about the ability and professionalism of the electricity department in handling such affairs. Are indeed qualified engineers on hand to guide and manage such outages. Are all sub stations regularly maintained, i.e. is maintenance regularly carried out or do the people involved wait for something to happen before attending to the problem? Do we have a problem with cadre employment here? Unfortunately, one can only assume that these types of instances only highlight that professional Management is lacking, at carrying out basic degrees of service and maintenance. In fact, this scenario would apply to the whole of the municipality under the responsibility of the city manager when one has only to look at the surrounds of this city to see the decay and lack of services been provided. These municipal officials together with their comrades in central government are probably the highest paid government officials in the world for doing virtually nothing. This is thanks to the ANC. Funny thing is that this outage was not reported in the Mercury! Was there a black out on reporting of this outage? Final question to the city manager, can we claim for food damages from the municipality?