- Say islandwide outage caused considerable loss
The Small-Scale Enterprise Owners’ Association/the Small- and Medium-scale Business Owners Association is demanding compensation for the losses incurred due to the islandwide power outage on 9 February.
Speaking to the media, the Association's National Organiser, Niluksha Kumara, stated that the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) needs to assess the losses caused by the outage and compensate the affected businesses.
He emphasised that the CEB has repeatedly failed to address such issues in recent history. Kumara pointed out that the island-wide outage halted production for six to seven hours, resulting in significant losses for small-scale businesses. "We rely heavily on electricity. Therefore, the islandwide outage on 9 February caused us considerable loss. We urge the CEB to assess this loss and compensate the consumers. According to the laws, they are obligated to compensate customers for such losses," he added.
He further noted that the outage had a detrimental effect on small-scale tourist hotels, which are gradually recovering from a series of crises. "The small-scale industries have been working hard to recover after facing back-to-back challenges. In this context, incidents like this have a severe impact. Most of the smaller tourist hotels, which don’t have extensive luxuries, faced numerous difficulties during the outage. This is the seventh time that an island-wide power cut has occurred in the past few years, and the CEB has failed to resolve the underlying issues," he concluded.
He called for the Government to compensate all small and medium-sized business owners including factories whose operations were disrupted.
“The power blackout lasted for six to seven hours, during which workers were idling as they could not operate the machines (production loss),” Kumara said. “However, we had to pay them their daily wages as well as bear other expenses as we had retained the workers in the hopes that the electricity would be back soon.”
On 9 February, an unexpected islandwide power outage occurred, disrupting the electricity supply for several hours. The power outage was explained by the Ministry of Energy as an emergency situation that occurred at the Panadura Grid Substation. Meanwhile, the Minister of Energy, Kumara Jayakody alleged that initial investigations have revealed that the lack of maintenance by the previous regime has led to the power blackout.