Rehoboth in the Hardap region has been hit by power outages in the past few days.
On Monday evening, power supply at the town was cut for almost two hours.
The electricity also went off on Saturday and only came back on Sunday at around 12h00.
The Rehoboth Town Council in a statement yesterday said the power outages are due to technical faults on the Auas-Narugas 132 kV line.
“The Namibia Power Corporation (NamPower) is attending to the problem to restore power as soon as possible, however, alternative supply might not be able to pick up all the load.
We are informed that it may take between two and four hours to have the power back on if possible, but may take much longer.
“We urge residents to please treat electricity as live and switch off all electrical appliances.
Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused,” the council’s statement reads.
In a previous statement on 4 January, the council announced that the town was experiencing power outages due to a fault on the NamPower circuit transformer.
“A new circuit transformer will be fully installed by 16h00 today.
The electricity will be restored without prior notification, therefore, residents are cautioned to please treat all connections as live.
“We apologise for the delayed update due to network and connection challenges,” the statement reads.
Resident Betty Wemmert, who runs a butchery, says the prolonged outages have affected her meat business, causing her to make losses. She says they do not have a backup generator.
“The meat and wors that we sell got spoiled. We had to throw away a lot of meat and this caused us to make losses.
Food safety is very important in my business as clients can get seriously ill.
If this goes on like this then I might have to shut down my small business and this is not right.
I have great passion for what I do and the business puts a roof over my family’s head,” Wemmert says.
Adam Platt, who operates a home-based computer and cellphone business, says the power failures substantially disrupted his business operations. He says the software systems abruptly shutting down caused him to lose data.
“If this goes on then I am scared of worse damages because sometimes if a computer shuts down while writing to the hard drive, it may fail to restart.
Frequent power outages can cause crashes to the computers and laptops.
Power outages always disrupt my services, decreasing customer satisfaction and causing missed deadlines and commitment to projects, as well as tarnishing a business’ reputation,” Platt says.
Mervin Beukes says most of his meat items for January have been spoiled.
“We bought a lot of meat like beef, lamb, turkey and chicken for this month because it was the festive season.
My family did not have the opportunity to spend time together during the holidays due to work obligations, so we made plans to rather spend time together in January.
It is sad that our special day has now been destroyed,” Beukes says.
Memory Klassen says the town often experiences power outages when it rains.
“We do want and need rain, but are always scared and nervous of power outages whenever it rains.
The Rehoboth Town Council must really do something to solve this problem. We residents deserve to enjoy the rain without any fear or worry that the electricity must go off for hours, sometimes even days. We, the people of Rehoboth, deserve better,” Klassen says.
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