Hospitals will not be protected from power cuts in the new load-shedding plan, contrary to an assurance given to the Johannesburg Hospital by City Power.
Hospital chief executive Saggie Pillay said he was ”surprised” by the information that his hospital would not be excluded from the load-shedding.
”A couple of weeks ago City Power gave us the reassurance that hospitals would be protected from power cuts”, he said.
With the new system it is ”extremely difficult” to exclude certain buildings like hospitals from the power failures, City Power’s general manager of supply availability, Louis Pieterse, said during the presentation of the new load-shedding plan on Wednesday.
In the new plan, which will be implemented from March 1 in the Johannesburg north-west area, where the hospital is situated, power cuts can be expected between 6pm and 10pm.
City Power’s director of engineering operation, Vally Padayachee, said the choice of a system in which hospitals were not excluded, had been a difficult decision.
”But since the hospitals now know when the load-shedding could occur, they can plan appropriately. We believe it is not an insurmountable problem for hospitals,” he said.
Pillay agreed, but said it would cause inconvenience to the patients, since no operations could be performed during the load-shedding except for emergency operations.
”We have sufficient back up power to deal with the power cuts, but only emergency operations would be performed in case there would be a problem with the back-up power.”
With the new load-shedding schedule Pillay estimated the costs of diesel for the hospital generators to be about R100 000 per month.
The hospital had not been affected by load-shedding since the reassurance to protect it from cuts was given by City Power.
”I hope they will respect the agreement we made,” he said.
Timetable
The City of Johannesburg on Wednesday launched a timetable of possible four-hour power cuts to help industry and residents plan ahead. The timetable, effective from March 1, divides the city into eight geographic blocks and sets out the times when planned power cuts could occur.
The timetable will be run monthly and will be published on the websites of the City of Johannesburg and City Power soon, as well as in newspapers, and will distributed to customers.