GPL offers compensation to customers suffering financial losses from blackouts

Customers who have suffered losses as a result of electricity fluctuations stand a chance of receiving compensation from the Guyana Power and Light (GPL).

GPL’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Shevon Sears explained that customers’ who believe their equipment and appliances were damaged as a result of the company, can file a complaint in order to open an investigation.

“If you feel that GPL would have been the cause of an appliance being burnt, you come in and access one of the ‘claim forms’ and you fill that form out and submit,” she explained at a news conference today.

An investigator is then assigned to the case to determine if indeed it was GPL’s fault.

“If it was GPL’s fault then we compensate those customers if the findings are analysed and it’s not GPL’s fault then we inform the customers,” Sears explained.

However, the PRO said she was unable at that time to reveal exactly how many complaints they have received over a period and how many customers they have compensated.

Nonetheless, she promised to provide that data to News Room within several days.

Further, she explained even though there are unplanned or planned outages, some areas suffer from blackouts as a result of “localised faults”.

“(This) might be where a tree falls on a network or there is a trip in the system in that area, so what we admonish our customers to do is to report those faults because we may not always know about those outages,” the PRO said.

Sears said GPL would always try to fix the problems as soon as possible, once it is brought to their attention.