Durban - The Msunduzi Municipality says it has received a huge volume of queries from businesses that want to claim from it for losses suffered due to power outages in the city.
The city’s electricity infrastructure is under strain and has failed several times causing blackouts. Last week there were several suburbs left without power after one of the city’s main substations, the Retief Street one, caught fire on December 29.
Last week, the city’s exco members held an emergency meeting to discuss the power outages. Fearing these could get worse in winter, exco approved emergency funding of R80 million to procure transformers to prevent more outages.
Municipal manager Madoda Khathide said businesses that had suffered losses were turning to the council to recoup those losses.
“The municipality is receiving huge volumes of insurance claim enquiries as a result of financial losses suffered by affected consumers during the disruptions,” he said.
He said in less than six months the municipality’s electricity department had seen major catastrophic failures in two of their major substations, namely Masons Primary (July 23) and Retief Primary (December 30).
These infrastructure breakdowns come after the Eastwood Primary substation was vandalised.
The outage at Masons Primary substation resulted in the loss of electricity supply to major customers and businesses for more than five days.
“Complaints received during the electricity disruptions suggest that the local business community is only operating for an average three hours a day as opposed to an average of nine hours a day, and this makes it practically impossible to survive.
“A number of SMMEs within the municipality had threatened to lay off their staff as a result of electricity outages and this alone has the potential of exacerbating the unemployment rate in the city,” said Khathide.
Mayor Mzimkhulu Thebolla said they did not encourage residents to claim because of the city’s financial position, but they were aware that claims were coming.
DA councillor Sibongiseni Majola said the situation could exacerbate an already bad financial situation.
“The municipal manager stated that the insurance company would not be able to pay all these claims and therefore the municipality will have to pay because these losses suffered by businesses are a result of negligence,” Majola said.
The Mercury