No payout for girl who lost her arm

A LITTLE girl who was shocked by a loose wire in a small Eastern Cape town, losing her right arm in the process, has lost her civil claim against the municipality.

Alzanne Afrikaner was just eight years old when the harrowing incident occurred in Pearston on January 8 2008.

Her father, Alfrido Afrikaner, instituted a civil claim against the Blue Crane Route Municipality on his daughter’s behalf.

Afrikaner claimed that the municipality was negligent in that it failed to maintain and secure an overhead power line.

However, as evidence was led in the Grahamstown High Court, it emerged that Alzanne had come into contact with a separate wire which had been hanging from the municipality’s power lines.

Defending the matter, Christoffel Botha, then acting head of the municipality’s electricity department, described the source of the accident as a bead wire from a car tyre. It was not known who had put it there.

Afrikaner’s case then changed somewhat and it was argued that the municipality had been under a legal duty to upgrade the network and was obliged to introduce a sensitive earth fault detection device.

While Judge Clive Plasket accepted the evidence of Alzanne’s parents about what had happened the day of the incident, he said it was unlikely that the municipal employees had even known about the loose wire.

Had they seen it, they would surely have removed it, the judge said.

An expert for the municipality testified that when Alzanne came into contact with the wire “she precipitated a short circuit fault to earth”.

Even if the network had functioned as it should have, the witness said, Alzanne would still have been injured in the way she was.

“The result of this is that the defendant’s failure to maintain the network was not the factual cause of Alzanne’s injuries.

“So, even if negligence and wrongfulness had been established, factual causation has not been established,” Plasket said.