A Makana Municipality official has condemned locals for their misuse of electricity and attributed the residents' "negative attitude towards saving electricity" as being one of the factors resulting in the CBD area experiencing a power cut on Thursday.
The power failure reportedly initially affected the Rhodes University area during the course of the day and later affected the CBD, including West Hill, Somerset Heights and Oaklands Heights. Many restaurants and fast-food outlets stopped operating because they had no equipment, such as generators, to help them deal with the power cut.
A Makana Municipality official has condemned locals for their misuse of electricity and attributed the residents' "negative attitude towards saving electricity" as being one of the factors resulting in the CBD area experiencing a power cut on Thursday.
The power failure reportedly initially affected the Rhodes University area during the course of the day and later affected the CBD, including West Hill, Somerset Heights and Oaklands Heights. Many restaurants and fast-food outlets stopped operating because they had no equipment, such as generators, to help them deal with the power cut.
Xhanti Bhokwe, the municipality's technician confirmed that the University area spent the day without electricity because the overhead conductors from the Grahamstown sub-station broke due to very windy weather and the high volumes of people using heaters.
"The breaker at Sugarloaf feeding the area, tripped. Grahamstown is an ever-increasing town that has many developments and infrastructure, thus resulting in more people using electricity. As a result of the cold and rainy weather that we had yesterday, more and more people excessively used electrical equipment, including heaters, resulting in the power load to increase."
Bhokwe said that the municipality, in turn, did their best to minimise the power load and ensure that there was even distribution of power amongst the various sub-stations. He also said that Grahamstown "won't be suffering such power failures again, as it is under control.''
The municipality is yet to put the energy efficiency programmes in place so as to "educate the community on ways to save electricity."
"Many people in Grahamstown do not want to work hand-in-hand with the municipality in ensuring that electricity is used wisely. Before, the municipality could not communicate with people and ask them to minimise excess use of electricity. We do now have energy efficiency programmes in place to assist us with that. There are equipments such as load management system, which controls geysers at peak hours. They switch off during peak hours, automatically. As good as that is, people refuse to use that system because they ask "If I can afford to have electricity, why cant I use it as I see fit?" That is a big challenge that we are currently facing but we hope to change that very soon," he said.
