Light at the end of tunnel for Brackenham residents
City addresses Brackenham residents power outages
TEMPERS flared at a public meeting last week held to address the recent Brackenham electricity outages.
The municipality has since appointed a contractor to lay temporary back up cables and the bundle conductor will now be replaced with a bare conductor.
Phase 4 of the suburb, namely the streets of Golden Fern, Frondosa, Blacktree Trail, Felt Fern, Fishtail and Grandiceps have been bombarded by ongoing power failures.
Last month residents were left for three days without electricity when a transformer exploded, causing multiple fires on the electricity poles.
Residents affected by the outage expressed their anger and frustrations during the meeting over the lack of help received from the municipality and ward councillor in addressing their electricity problems.
Ward councillor, AS Dawood said the city had to source funds from other budgets and is in the process of looking to have the cables replaced underground in the next financial year.
‘Over the 25 years, the heat and rain has affected the cables and made them brittle.
‘When it rains the lights trip and on the most recent incident an explosion on the transformers caused fires.’
As this is an ongoing problem, residents said they are making frequent claims which has spiked their premiums and now insurances are refusing to pay out for the recent claim owing to several previous claims.
