Scheduled blackouts, known as load shedding, have plagued South Africa. (Figurative)
Johannesburg, South Africa:
The power crisis that has gripped South Africa can leave citizens and businesses deprived of electricity for hours, but few victims are more vulnerable than undertakers.
Morgue directors are urging mourners to hold speedy funerals to prevent spoilage and relieve pressure on morgue refrigerators.
“The industry is seeing a lot of rotting bodies,” the South African Funeral Physicians Association (SAFPA) stated bluntly this week.
Burial within four days “is cost effective and prevents families from seeing their deceased in a bad state of decomposition,” he said.
That might require an uncomfortable change in a country where most funerals take place a week or two after death, and mourners file past an open casket, corpses on display, on the day of the funeral.
Undertakers ease reliance on state electricity monopoly Eskom by using diesel generators to keep their morgues cool. But they are being hit with sky-high energy bills.
“Smaller halls are struggling to make ends meet because now most of their funds are going to deal” with the cuts, said Dududu Magano, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.
Scheduled blackouts, known as load shedding, have plagued Africa’s most industrialized economy for more than a decade as Eskom’s creaky coal plants struggle to keep up with demand.
But blackouts have reached new extremes in the past year, with power outages sometimes up to four times a day, for periods of up to four and a half hours.
Grace Matila, a Johannesburg undertaker for 10 years, blamed blackouts for the recent failure of her refrigerator compressor.
“The constant turning on and off caused it to stop working, but luckily I had a backup compressor. Can you imagine what would have happened if I didn’t?” he told AFP, saying he would have to pass the higher electricity costs on to customers.
‘Domino effect’
Industry regulations require funeral homes and morgues to have backup generators, but not all comply.
“Generators are not cheap,” said Mike Nqakula, who owns a funeral home in the small town of Uitenhage, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of Johannesburg, adding that many others in his town are doing without them.
“I know a guy whose salon had to close because the municipality discovered a decomposed body,” the 61-year-old told AFP.
And the concerns of undertakers don’t end with trying to preserve the bodies.
The blackouts are also hampering attempts to obtain administrative documents needed to carry out burials or cremations, as Home Office offices go offline when power goes out, Magano said.
The blackouts have caused a “ripple effect” across the sector, he added.
Phone calls are unpredictable when phone batteries are dead and cannot be charged, or network signals are weak because cell phone towers are down.
As a result, people sometimes have difficulty contacting paramedics so they can certify that a person is dead or to request removal of the body when a death occurs in the home.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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