Crushing blow for North Coast cane farmers

Gledhow Sugar Mill’s general manager, Andrew Francis, said their best estimate at this stage was that the factory will only be able to restart on May 14, making it over a month out of production.

“Starting to crush cane by then depends largely on how quickly we can clean, repair and recommission all of our electrical equipment,” said Francis.

The mill flooded when the adjacent Ntshawini River burst its banks upstream, causing a 1.5m high flow of water to stream through the boilers, raw house and refinery, exiting the factory near the sugar warehouse.

“Extensive electrical and mechanical equipment was submerged below the water and hundreds of tons of sugar was washed away. Our sugar warehouse, containing about 5 700 tons of sugar, was flooded to a depth of 2 metres. Most of these sugar stocks were damaged or lost.”

The estimated value of the damage and lost sugar is about R60-million.

The cost of repairs and restoration to get the mill back up and running is about R30-million.

“Our staff are working around the clock to restore our plant. We would have been able to crush about 178 000 tons of cane over the 4-week plus period and produce more than 18 000 tons of refined sugar. The floods and lost production are having an extremely negative effect on the cashflow of both our sugar milling business and that of our growers.