Eskom, the Hawks, and Vosman police raided premises suspected to be linked to cable theft incidents on Tuesday, 8 March, resulting in the arrest of 14 suspects.<\/p>\n
“Large volumes of cables, comprising of aluminium and copper were found stored on multiple premises, including a scrap metal dealer,” Eskom said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Following an investigation into several theft and vandalism incidents on the 400kV Vulcan Transmission line in the region, the team visited a scrap metal dealer in Witbank, where large amounts of copper cables were found on a truck that was waiting to off-load.<\/p>\n
“The truck driver was arrested and later pointed out the residential property in Vosman, where he collected the stolen cable from earlier,” Eskom said.<\/p>\n
“More copper cables were found at the said residential premises, all of which was prepared and in readiness to be collected.”<\/p>\n
The power utility added that it had discovered that security personnel hired to protect the 400kV Vulcan Transmission line were involved with the syndicate.<\/p>\n
A criminal case has been opened against the suspects \u2014 including the scrap dealer \u2014 and Eskom expects that more arrests will follow.<\/p>\n
According to Eskom, repeated cable theft incidents cause extensive damage, a loss of supply to thousands of customers, and increased safety risks.<\/p>\n
Towers on the Vulcan Transmission line were severely damaged, and local roads were blocked with fallen electrical lines following the incidents of theft and vandalism Eskom has experienced over the past week.<\/p>\n
“Cable theft continuously affects business operations and hamper the provision of basic essential services to industries and communities,” Eskom’s\u00a0head of security, Karen Pillay, said.<\/p>\n
Power cuts and the implementation of load-shedding are also aggravated as a result, and the losses incurred due to the theft result in Eskom wanting to charge higher tariffs.<\/p>\n
“Customers pay the price for such crimes through increased tariffs. Eskom urges all scrap metal dealers, foundries and smelters to refrain from buying stolen cables,” the power utility said.<\/p>\n
According to Eskom CEO Andr\u00e9 de Ruyter, the arrests will help to restore faith in the state-owned power utility as it continues “to fight the scourge of crime that plagues the institutions and the country”.<\/p>\n
Following an investigation into several theft and vandalism incidents on its infrastructure in Mpumalanga, Eskom and the Hawks arrested 14 people suspected to be involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341076,"featured_media":408754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27995],"tags":[61891,5192,181,77134,24060],"class_list":["post-436832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","tag-andre-de-ruyter","tag-cable-theft","tag-eskom","tag-karen-pillay","tag-the-hawks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436848,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436832\/revisions\/436848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}