Power failure ruins family

DAVID HALL

dhall@kiamaindependent.com.au

Three electricity outages in the space of 15 minutes last October has left former Gerringong photographers BCP Photo-Graphics in ruins, financially, after losing the photos from five weddings.

The power incident happened on October 8, 2009 and the repercussions have been catastrophic to their family, while the electricity company which supplied their power has failed to admit liability.

“I called Integral Energy immediately after the outages and they said that 508 customers were affected - and they said it was ‘adverse weather’ that affected the transformer in the area,” Mrs Fielden said.

“But, surprisingly, when I rang back to enquire about making a claim, they denied any knowledge of the incident, until I pointed out I had already been told about the other customers involved,” she added.

“We had a RAID Server backup system and were also doing another external backup at the time. The system means if one of the hard drives went bad it would automatically download from one drive to the next, and there were five hard drives at one terabyte each - it was supposed to be the best system you could get,” Mr Fielden said.

They sent the hard drive to one of the best Data retrieval companies in Australia, at a cost of $7,000, and lost an untold number of photos.

“I cried for days when I found out,” Mrs Fielden said.

“We lodged a claim for damages through our insurance company, but because we had backup systems like surge protectors and backup systems in place, and there was no negligence on our behalf and the incident was an ‘act of God’, they agreed to give us an ex-gratia payment of $3,325 to cover our hardware and suggested we pursue Intergal,” Mrs Fielden said.

“The Energy Ombudsman told us that claims like this are seldom successful as, incredibly, Integral Energy have no obligation to supply a constant source of electricity.

“We contacted the Department of Fair Trading and they have been very helpful but have said that we need to keep pursuing the Energy Ombudsman - or contact the Consumer Trading and Tenancy Tribunal,” she added.

“We were a small family business trying to make a living and now we find ourselves battling for our very existence, while a big company like Integral just goes on as if nothing had happened,” Mrs Fielden said.

Mr Fielden said it would have been easy for their company to declare bankruptcy and walk away.

“But we just couldn’t do that to our clients. If we had done that there would have been a lot of people losing the money they paid us and had nothing to show for it,” Mr Fielden said.

“We are also the victims in this, sometimes even more so than our clients, as our business and livelihood has been ruined and we made the commitment to honour our clients and make sure they got what they paid for,” Mr Fielden said.

“The cost of reshooting weddings has been staggering and left us shattered and our business ruined,” he said.

A spokesperson said Integral Energy had undertaken a thorough investigation before denying the claim lodged by BCP Photo-Graphics.

“While we sympathise with the difficult situation BCP Photo-Graphics are in, we can only pay claims where there is evidence that our network is the source of the damage,” a spokesperson said.

“This is not the case in this instance. While there was a series of short outages that day, this was not the source of damage to the customer’s equipment. This finding was supported by an independent investigation of the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW (EWON) which has upheld Integral Energy’s decision,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said Integral Energy recommended all businesses to review their insurance arrangements to protect their assets.