Africa-Press – South-Africa. In an attempt to prevent the water system from collapsing, Rand Water took full control of flow management at its reservoirs in Gauteng on Friday night because it could not rely on residents to reduce water usage by themselves.
Consumption was high, despite Stage 2 water restrictions last week, prompting the utility to take over.
Reservoirs are constantly being emptied as water is used faster than it can be replaced. The emptying of the reservoirs would lead to a complete collapse of the water system, which supports around 17 million people in municipalities it supplies.
Rand Water applied added flow control from 20:00 on Friday. This will continue until the system recovers.
The intermittent water supply will affect some areas in the:
The Brixton reservoir was shut off at midday on Friday to build capacity and supplement water from the Crosby pump station to Hursthill reservoirs, which had critically low levels.
Johannesburg Water said it would negatively impact all residents on that grid. It said Helen Joseph Hospital in Auckland Park and Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in Coronationville had adequate supply.
According to Environment, Infrastructure and Service Delivery (EISD) MMC Mpho Sesedinyane, bolstering the system that supplies the Brixton, Crosby and Hursthill water systems is a solution for communities in high-lying area, which have experienced the worst of the water shortages.
Sesedinyane said on Friday that work to add a new reservoir to the ailing system in Johannesburg would begin next month.
This after a week of talks with Johannesburg Water, which acquires bulk water from Rand Water and distributes it to homes and businesses in the city.
Sesedinyane added that he would meet with Rand Water next week to discuss adding a back-up power supply to the city’s reservoirs. He said it would need a large supply of electricity for this, possibly its own substation.
But according to Rand Water spokesperson Makenosi Maroo, the entity has back-up generators for its water pumps.
She said the entity had an agreement with Eskom that it would not implement load shedding at primary treatment and booster stations and that Rand Water was affected by load shedding only at its tertiary supply, which uses back-up generators to pump water. These need a minute or two to kick in.
Parts of Johannesburg have been without water for two weeks or longer.
The water woes in the country’s economic hub came to a head last week when Rand Water was forced to throttle its supply to Gauteng’s major municipalities – Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane – by 30% to regain favourable levels in its reserves, which dipped below 40% on Tuesday.
The recent heatwave and load shedding were blamed for added pressure to the water supply, which was already stretched because the water infrastructure was not upgraded as the population grew.
Rand Water had to increase its water supply since spring from 4 300 million litres a day to 4 900 million litres a day. This, despite already exceeding its abstraction licence by 400 million cubic metres of water per annum. It said on average, the world’s population uses 173 litres of water a day whereas the average water consumption in Gauteng is 300 litres of water a day.
Nationally, South Africa also loses around 38% of its potable water as a result of leaks. Johannesburg loses more than 40% of its clean drinking water due to water pipes that are as old as 100 years, which needed to be replaced decades ago.
Johannesburg Water needs R8 billion for urgent repairs to its infrastructure, according to a report by previous EISD MMC, Michael Sun, in September. But the City only has a capital budget provision of R7.7 billion for all its infrastructure.
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