Joburg calls for 3-day loadshedding exemption to deal with rain-hampered outages

The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) has urgently requested State-owned utility Eskom to grant it a reprieve from loadshedding for three days to meet the [nearly insurmountable] challenge of escalating faults and outages following torrential rain in Gauteng. “Power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts. Accordingly, CoJ mayor Mpho Phalatse, on behalf of City Power, submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from loadshedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.”