eskom
Inside the ambulance, his female colleague lay on a stretcher with a serious gunshot wound to her head after she was allegedly shot by Kwa-Thema hostel residents near Springs, east of Joburg, on Tuesday.
Residents erupted as Eskom officials arrived under police escort to disconnect illegal electricity connections from mains power boxes in the area.
As they were leaving, shots rang out from hostel windows.
Constable Nolwandle Moeti, who is in her 20s, was hit in the head during the shootout.
Police raided the hostel, ransacking rooms and body-searching residents.
"No firearms were found during the search but four suspects were taken into custody for questioning. We're still trying to establish who actually pulled the trigger," said police spokesperson Captain Enoch Dube.
Moeti, who was based at Kwa-Thema police station and worked for the Crime Prevention Unit, was in a critical but stable condition at a Joburg hospital.
Dube said Eskom had begun disconnecting after four people, including a nine-month-pregnant woman and a 3-year-old baby, were electrocuted because of the connections.
"These unsafe illegal connections are normally made carelessly from nearby schools and mains power boxes in the area.
Hostel residents told us they have been trying to get their councillors to sort out their electricity problems for more than 10 years, hence they made illegal connections," he said.
PowerFox: Monitor load shedding using Firefox - This is definitely something for our South African readers where rolling blackouts are becoming a way of life. A few bright sparks (pardon the pun) have got together and created PowerFox, an extension for Firefox 2 that adds a small icon to the browser’s status bar indicating the current power status as reported by the PowerAlert site’s RSS feed. Clever. Unless of course you’re in the middle of a blackout when I suppose you won’t need Firefox to point out the obvious. [tectonic]
Johannesburg - Megawatt Park was without MegaWatts on Monday when Eskom load-shedded itself.
The power company could not even access its own website to check which areas were without electricity - the server was down, said an official who asked not want to be named.
The Eskom head office in Sunninghill, northern Johannesburg, was without power from 10:00 until at least 12:30.
However, it had already switched off the pumps to its water features on Friday, when it became apparent that the power supply was tight.
Staff had to resort to actually climbing the escalators when they were switched off along with the geysers and the air-conditioning systems last week.
Each Eskom facility throughout the country had a designated official tasked with ensuring - when it became apparent that load shedding might be in the offing - that it was energy efficient.
"Naturally, all Eskom facilities have to be energy efficient," the unnamed spokesperson said.
There were rolling blackouts across the country on Monday when Eskom tried to shed between 1000 and 1500MW.
Apart from maintenance problems, a shortage of diesel was affecting the back-up gas turbines used to generate power in the Western Cape, said Eskom's general manager of demand-side management Andrew Etzinger.
A fixed load-shedding schedule was available on www.eskom.co.za and customers could direct other queries to Eskom's call-centre on 08600 37566.
The call centre was centrally located and was not affected by the power outage at Megawatt Park, Eskom said.
