Mitchells Plain continues to see increase in theft and vandalism of electricity infrastructure

Mitchells Plain continues to see an increase in theft and vandalism incidents, with electricity supply complaints, with the biggest impact being on streetlights.

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According to the City of Cape Town, area South, especially Mitchells Plain, has been the most impacted with 153 or 70% of the total incidents of 242 happening in this area.

The municipality says between April and June 2024, it has spent about R7,3 million to fix theft and vandalised infrastructure.

‘’Theft and vandalism impacting streetlights comprises the majority of the repair costs of R4,2 million as public lighting is an easy target due to easy access for criminals damaging the infrastructure to perform illegal activities,’’ said Xanthea Limberg, Mayco Member for Energy.

‘’Due to this crisis situation many interventions are being driven both to enable energy teams to fix streetlights faster but also to reduce the risks of the crisis-levels of theft and vandalism.,’’ she added.

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Limberg says between 31 July and 13 August 2024, City energy teams attended to 5 810 streetlight-related requests across the metro, bringing the total attended to in a month to more than 13 210. She says the City services more than 245 000 streetlights in total.

‘’We need our residents to stand with us to Protect Their Power. We’ve launched our anonymous tip off campaign called Let’s ACT – Protect Your Power – urging residents to report suspicious activity to us. We will take action.’’

On measures put in place to combat the scourge, Limberg says they have deployed more boots on the ground, and beefing up resources with about R40 million to tackle this crisis.

‘’We’ve added more security escorts to help our teams attend to outages caused by theft and illegal connections. We’ve also looked holistically at this situation, replacing the copper material with aluminium where possible to reduce the street value, rolling out more and more underground cabling where feasible, increasing CCTV monitoring and looking at more innovative solutions that will be rolled out in the near future.’’

''We are also embarking on enhanced community cooperation engagements, education and awareness drives, because we are absolutely committed to safer and brighter communities,’’ added Xanthea Limberg, Mayoral Committee Member for Energy.

 

Done By: Mitchum George