City spends millions to fix stolen, vandalised lights

The City spent more than R7 million to fix vandalised and stolen electricity infrastructure from April to June, says mayoral committee member for energy Xanthea Limberg.

“The latest data shows a total of 242 theft and vandalism incidents reported with estimated costs of repairs amounting to R7.3 million,” Ms Limberg said in a statement, adding that damage to street lights accounted for R4.2 million of those repair costs.

“Area South, especially Mitchell’s Plain, has been the most impacted with 153 or 70% of the total incidents of 242 happening in this area,” she said.

The City was taking measures to ensure that its technicians could fix street lights faster and to “reduce the risks of the crisis-levels of theft and vandalism”, she said.

From July 31 to August 13, City staff had attended to 5 810 street light-related requests across the metro, bringing the total attended to in a month to more than 13 000, she said, noting that the City serviced more than 245 000 street lights in total.

The City has launched an anonymous tip-off campaign, Let’s Act – Protect Your Power, to encourage the public to report suspicious activity.

“We’ve put more boots on the ground with contracting services and also through our energy safety teams, 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,” said Ms Limberg.

Other counter-measures included replacing copper with aluminium where possible, using more underground cabling, increasing CCTV monitoring and running public awareness drives, she said.

To report suspicious behaviour or provide an anonymous tip-off call, 021 480 7700.