The South African Weather Service (SAWS) has issued an advisory of intense weather, which, depending on the severity of the weather, could lead to high service request call volumes for electricity, according to a recently released press statement by the City of Cape Town.
A potent cut-off low-pressure system is expected to sweep through the Western Cape, starting Saturday evening, 6 April and persisting until Monday, 8 April, according to the SAWS.
Also read: Cape Town braces for intense weather as SAWS issues warning
The high demand for electricity during these conditions can potentially be caused by weather-related damage to power infrastructure and longer outages.
‘While we hope the expected inclement weather is not severe and will not have a big impact on electricity services, during episodes of bad weather there is a risk of increased damage to electrical infrastructure,’ said Councillor Beverley van Reenen, the City’s Mayoral Committee (Mayco) Member for Energy.
‘Damaged infrastructure typically takes longer to repair. If heavy showers and high winds are experienced, it may also impact the time that it takes teams to attend to outages as they can only attend to electrical work once weather conditions improve and it is safe to do so,’ Van Reenen added.
Van Reenen has further advised that residents of Cape Town should ‘only use one reporting channel when reporting faults to the City’, to avoid delays in attending to duplicate service requests.
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