City Power urged Johannesburg residents to take extra care on Tuesday after ongoing rain slowed electricity repairs in parts of the city.

The utility asked customers to “exercise caution as persistent rainfall continues to affect parts of the city”.

Rain slowed repair work

The utility said the wet weather did not cause a big jump in faults.

However, it said crews could not complete some jobs during the storm.

According to City Power, “response and restoration times may be longer than usual in some areas”.

Teams also had to wait for conditions to improve before repairs could safely go ahead, the utility said.

Open customer calls increased

City Power recorded 3 672 open customer calls across its eight service delivery centres on Tuesday morning.

That was up from 2 792 calls the previous morning.

“We anticipate sustained pressure on operations this morning,” the utility said.

It added that “Technical teams remain on standby to respond to outages, infrastructure damage, flooding-related incidents and other faults”.

Areas affected by outages

In Alexandra, heavy rain hit two outages at Gresswold Substation.

Installation work affecting parts of 10th and 3rd Roads in Kew was paused, then resumed on Tuesday.

At Wynberg North, City Power said: “The cable fault has been located, but repair work was delayed by the rainfall”. It confirmed that “Technical teams are currently on site attending to the outage”.

In the Hursthill area, crews attended several outages, including in Mayfair, Northcliff Extension 12 and Franklin Roosevelt Park. This delayed planned restoration work.

In Midrand, teams fixed an outage in Austin View on Monday, but supply “continued to trip due to the persistent rainfall”.

City Power later said, “power supply has since been successfully restored this morning”.

How to stay safe during wet weather

City Power told customers to “stay away from fallen power lines, exposed cables, damaged electrical equipment and flooded areas”.

It stressed that people “should never attempt to repair electrical faults themselves”.

Customers were also asked to report dangerous situations immediately and keep children away from flooded areas.

The utility further appealed to residents to “use electricity sparingly” while supply returned.

It said this would ease pressure on the network.

City Power added, “We will continue monitoring the weather and its impact on the electricity network.”