I was going to write this, last night, after an outage of over 4 hours in the morning. But, again thanks to our very inefficient and opaque power company plunged us, who live in North Coast, in particular Nyali, into yet another time travel of a century back, I could not write this. Since we lost power yet again (second one in a day), from just before 7.00 pm to about an hour short of midnight!
First, let's take the matter of people, including their own employees, getting electrocuted...
I thought there was a regulation that no structure should be built or allowed to be built within a minimum of 6 feet of power poles or lines. But, what do we have here? Yesterday, 3 painters in Tudor got electrocuted while painting some building using a metal ladder. Now, how close was this building to the power lines?
Are not the town planners at the Council supposed to work hand in hand with major utilities when allowing a building to be put up so that such incidences (not accidents), do not happen? What I have found, instead, is that the town planners pass the plans and then write letters to the utility companies to supply their services.
And these services in turn behave like - hear no evil and see no evil and act dumb. They, without looking at the whole set up of how and where this structure is coming up, blindly supply their questionable 'services' which often result in fires and electrocutions, etc.
IF, these people would just be ethical and responsible, they should refuse to supply their 'services', as soon as they notice a breach. But, no. They do not even give a thought to the consequences of what they are doing because this country's officialdom have become so fond of money that they will overlook almost ANYTHING given the right price!
In fact, if they followed their own law and refused to supply services, there would be a marked reduction in illegal structures of questionable origins and it would also have a domino effect everywhere.
Secondly, why, when carrying out maintenance, does Kenya Power NEVER abide by the timings advertised in the papers? Not only that, but, when they finally are restoring power, most times they plunge others into darkness before they finally bring us back to the 21st century! This happened to us, last night when they were restoring power to the Bamburi area which had been on a scheduled maintenance outage the whole day.
When I called the chief engineer to find out why we were suffering the 2nd outage of the day, I was told that they had a 'problem' while switching on the power for the Bamburi area. I was assured that it would take about an hour to restore power. Unfortunately, for us, the hour came and went and another one and another one but no sign of light. At one point, I was told that the lines are overloaded and hence our constant power problems.
Finally, they (ALL the senior officers of Kenya Power), quit answering their phones! Later, after the power came back, I got an automated message from a senior officer to call him back at 10.10 pm!!!!
Another one responded in like manner at 6.35 am, this morning!
What is the matter with these people? Do they sound responsible and ethical? I was even told by another senior personnel that they are trying to 'serve us better'!
I believe they are doing just the opposite...!
Very disgusted and FED UP!!!
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