Brackenham power under discussion

WARD 26 councillor, AS Dawood has called a public meeting discuss the recent Brackenham power outage which left residents without electricity for three days.

Residents from Gibbum Grove, Golden Fern, Frondosa, Blacktree Trail, Felt Fern, Fishtail and Grandiceps streets were affected and were literally left in the dark from last Sunday to Wednesday.

The massive power failure was caused by a transformer that exploded.

Community members are urged to attend the meeting at the Brackenham Community Hall on 10 February at 7pm where the matter will be discussed in detail and concerns and questions relating to the outage can be raised.

City of uMhlathuze municipal spokesperson Mdu Ncalane said while technicians worked tirelessly to restore the power, new challenges continued to surface.

‘Our team had to navigate through fenced houses, big trees and some houses locked, with no access to the faulty poles.

,The major challenge is the whole settlement was designed without considering the electricity maintenance and repairs.

‘Poles and cables run through back yards and in between the houses and some are jointly fenced and this made it hard for technicians to work with the anticipated pace.

‘Repairing this problem is a temporary measure as the city has to relocate all the electricity poles and cables along the road for easy access to maintenance and fixing as we have reached a point where maintenance is not possible.

‘This has been budgetted for in this financial year,’ Ncalane said.