Tunisia: Power cuts amid heatwave leave residents and businesses struggling
Tunisia is among the countries that have sweltered under internse heat in recent weeks. With the need for air conditioning mounting, the national electricity company has resorted to rolling blackouts to reduce the strain on the power grid.
The power cuts have come with a heavy cost at some farms, where workers say they lost thousands of chickens.
Hamza Bouchrit, a poultry farm veterinarian, said, “we had a power cut. Nearly 90 percent of the chickens died, between 150,000 and 200,000. There was a power outage. We have a backup generator that is only used for troubleshooting. It’s designed to run for two to three hours. The power cut lasted a long time. The generator overheated and stopped working. The disaster happened.”
Employees at the farm say the blackouts have heavily impacted their working conditions, making it difficult to carry out routine tasks.
Bouchrit says, “we’re still at a standstill. We keep on collecting the dead (chickens). The smell of dead chickens is terrible. We don’t understand, it’s close to 400 to 500 tonnes of meat. That’s a loss of more than 1,400,000 to 1,500,000 dinars (around 445,000 euros). It’s an enormous loss.”
And its not the only farm to have been impacted. At a neighbouring dairy farm, workers had to throw out milk, as Aziz Bouhejba, a milk producer, explains, saying, “we took losses because we had to literally throw away milk. We dumped six days worth of milking, which comes to about 1,200 litres of milk that we had to pour away, that we had to throw out. That’s a straight loss that we’re finding very hard to recover from.”
The fishing sector has also suffered from the heatwave, as the price of ice has gone up, in turn driving up the prices of fish.
