Fuel retailers hard hit in KZN disaster amid recent heavy floods
THE FLOODING in KwaZulu-Natal has damaged supply and retail chains in the already hard-hit fuel retail industry, fuel retail industry management consultancy PetroConnect said at the weekend.
The State of Disaster in the province has seen many local businesses and petrol stations destroyed, bringing their operations to a grinding halt.
Exacerbating the situation, the public has been panic buying fuel, stirred by false social media messages, leading to triple the daily average sales at some service stations thereby creating an even greater demand on the already restricted supply chain, the company said.
PetroConnect’s directors and cofounders Sbonelo Mbatha and Mark Harper, in an interview with Business Report, said with the latest disaster it would take time to build up fuel retailers’ sales again in the already ailing economy. PetroConnect said unfortunately, many fuel retailer sites were severely impacted as many experienced structural damage to their facilities, especially those in low lying areas.
“The repair work values will be quantified in the coming weeks, but this is estimated to be millions of rands to repair many of these sites. A significant amount of money has already been spent on pumping out water from the tanks underground, which is a technical job, due to the flammable substances being worked with”, they said.
“A lot of sites will continue to run on generators due to the electricity challenges leading to even greater costs to keep the sites running with many not able to sell essentials like electricity and airtime due to cell phone towers being affected and taking these services offline,” they added.
However, PetroConnect said there had been some improvement within the past two days in terms of the logistical challenges the oil companies were facing. Bayhead Road, being the main arterial road in and out of the depots, was damaged badly during the recent floods, which was unusable and would take time for Transnet to fix it.
“Transnet did issue communication that they are already working on the road and will do what they can to return it to normal soon. The challenge was then to get approval to use another road, which took more than a day to get from the authorities, leading to even further delays with service stations running dry all over the province.
“There has also been congestion at the gantry to further exacerbate the challenges,” they said.
According to PetroConnect, which is owned by petrol station owners, an average service station took a delivery (tanker) of fuel every three days with busier sites taking a daily delivery in some cases.