Last night or should I say in the early hours of the morning we had our power cut off and it has only just returned. This was what they call an unplanned outage that lasted 13 hours.
The updates from our service provider made no mention of the exact problem and it was external sources that informed us. This was cable theft and the good news is the private security company who many of us use caught the thieves in the act. I think they are getting the hang of where to look when the power goes down which is good news even if it does not stop the damage being done.
Scanning through the outages across Johannesburg over the last week and what was noticeable is that the crime with cable theft is on the increase. With the country having around 50% unemployment this is kind of expected yet the ones being caught are all illegal migrants. This is the problem when you have undocumented people roaming the streets.
This 45 meters of cable would have earned the thieves more than R200K due to the weight of the copper. Earlier in the week two people were arrested with 14 meters of cable worth R80K. This type of crime is too easy and too lucrative if you know what you are doing and why the unemployed undocumented foreigners turn to this.
In every instance the police are not apprehending the thieves, but it is the local private security firms getting the job done and why they are so important and worth the monthly subscription we pay. If they were not around it would be up to us and why lawlessness breeds vigilantism and has always been like that.
Before the private security firms we had our own neighborhood watch where we would patrol the area ourselves with each member having set days they would patrol at set times. I used to always do the midnight-4 am because that was when most things were likely to happen and did not want people who were incapable of handling it on patrol. The private security firms mean they do what we used to do, but are trained and have the tools plus the back up. For every policeman in SA there is 5 private security officers and why they make such a difference.
When searching for cable theft I noticed this is not just an SA thing anymore and is happening in the US and UK. This is not normal behavior and you will find the majority behind this are the illegal migrants. The normal criminals don't cross the line of stealing infrastructure because that is even taboo for them. We never had this problem before open borders and the worst they did was steal the railway tracks, but never digging up the electricity cables.
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