The National Funeral Practitioners Association of SA, the largest funeral parlour association in the country, says funeral parlours are being hit hard by load shedding as they are spending large amounts of money on generators and fuel to ensure that bodies in mortuaries are properly preserved before burials.
THE NATIONAL Funeral Practitioners Association of SA, the largest funeral parlour association in the country, says funeral parlours are being hit hard by load shedding as they are spending large amounts of money on generators and fuel to ensure that bodies in mortuaries are properly preserved before burials.
Dududu Magano, the association’s spokesperson, said funeral parlours were dealing with many challenges.
“The major issue is load shedding. There is no power for a number of hours and sometimes the power does not come on at the scheduled time. This makes you incur additional costs.
“We have had to invest a lot of money in back-up generators. By law, funeral parlours need to have back-up generators for storing bodies at mortuaries. However, we have had to invest in additional generators and at times we are forced to use these back-up generators for 12 hours. This has also forced us to purchase extra fuel.”
Despite the issues, Magano said parlours were working to ensure that bodies were preserved so that members of the public could have proper burials for their loved ones.
“We have done our best by paying the extra costs to ensure that bodies are kept in mortuaries at the required temperature.”
Magano said the industry wanted to engage with the relevant stakeholders to see how businesses could be assisted.
The owner of a funeral Service said they previously had one generator, but recently had to invest in a much larger unit.
“It is really not easy. We are spending a lot of money on fuel. We have to have additional staff just to ensure that the temperature remains at the right level.
“It has drastically increased our workload because we need staff at the cold room for 24 hours because of the amount of load shedding that we are having.”
Load shedding was also affecting funeral services, he said.
“Venues where we conduct funerals are constantly affected by load shedding. We are in summer and sometimes 200 to 300 people attend funerals. It is difficult as sometimes there’s no aircon because of load shedding.
“We actually feel that it’s time that the government does something to assist us as we are an essential service.”
Another funeral service operator agreed, saying that load shedding was impacting on all aspects of the business.
“It really is so sad as we want to ensure that members of the public give their loved ones the best send-off but load shedding is disrupting funerals. We are struggling to survive with all the costs we are incurring which include running generators.”
