While most electricity users are being urged to switch off to save energy, Cape Town authorities are keeping street lights switched on day and night in large areas of the city.
According to the city’s public lighting manager Charles Kadalie, this is being done in a bid to combat the widespread plundering of copper from substations and power lines.
”Under normal circumstances, there would be no justification for wasting power and we should all be diligently conserving this precious commodity,” he said on Wednesday.
”Unfortunately, the city is suffering from an unprecedented onslaught from cable thieves, most of whom are tik addicts, desperate for drug money.
”An effective deterrent is to keep the street lights burning as thieves rarely risk their lives by hacking into live wires.”
One of the ”hot spots”, Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, had been vandalised so badly, there was ”almost nothing left to repair”.
Electricity workers had been assaulted while undertaking repairs and council trucks had been stripped by gangs in broad daylight.
Roads such as the N2 and Settlers Way, from Rondebosch to Somerset West, had also suffered major blackouts because of cable theft.
Kadalie said the cost of running a 350m stretch of ten 70 watt street lights was about R3,50 a day, while the cost of replacing stolen cable and vandalised equipment was nearly R35 000 per incident.
In a bid to conserve energy, the city would replace all the 80 watt mercury-vapour bulbs currently used in street lighting with 70 watt high-pressure sodium bulbs.
This would result in estimated energy savings of 12%. – Sapa