City Power said it is has observed a trend of illegal constructions and property extensions, in areas designated for municipal service network.
The local power utility, said residents will need to fork out costs associated with rerouting the cables.
Isaac Mangena said in a statement, “we would like to inform residents of Alexandra and other parts of the City that we will not be repairing faults that are located underneath properties that have encroached on our underground servitudes. In such cases, residents will be responsible for the costs, as we cannot continue to accommodate these expenses.”
He said this hampers work on repairs and maintenance.
Here is a few examples of recent incidents.
City Power said “at No. 28 on 7th Avenue and No. 32 on 4th Avenue, we reported faulty low voltage cables in December last year. Unfortunately, these issues remain unresolved due to the structures built over the servitude.
At No. 1722 in Extension 2, a faulty medium voltage cable caused an area outage last month. The repairs took over a week due to accessibility issues, and we recently faced over 24 hours of downtime for another outage caused by the same fault.
In Setswetla, we encountered a delay of almost a week in replacing a pole-mounted transformer due to constructions built around it.”