Johannesburg residents have had to put up with power and water outages as freezing weather buffets SA’s richest and largest metro.
Bulk supplier Rand Water is embarking on a 58-hour water cut to carry out maintenance work to improve delivery to its customers.
Rand Water supplies the Gauteng metros of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and the capital city of Tshwane, local municipalities, mines and other industries, as well as parts of Mpumalanga, the North West and the Free State with an average of 3.653-million litres of potable water daily. Gauteng is SA’s economic hub and contributes about 40% to national GDP.
Rand Water said the planned maintenance, from 7pm on Tuesday to 5am on Friday, will be undertaken to replace multiple valves at the Vereeniging water treatment plant, Eikenhof booster pumping station and Zuikerbosch water treatment plant, and the last part of the project will be work on electrical boards at Lethabo pumping station.
“This project forms part of Rand Water’s maintenance strategy that focuses on proactive refurbishment and upgrading of its infrastructure to ensure future sustainability,” Rand Water said in a statement.
“Some residents within the Rustenburg local municipality, Mogale City local municipality and the Rand West local municipality will experience intermittent water supply during the implementation of the project.”
More than 100 areas of Johannesburg, SA’s biggest metro with 6-million residents, will be affected by the water outage.
Joburg metro’s environment and infrastructure services MEC Jack Sekwaila said: “The purpose of the shutdown is to provide a window for maintenance that cannot be executed while the plant is operational. This will assist in upgrading the infrastructure and keep it functioning optimally, and improve its reliability.”
The recovery can take about five to 14 days after water supply has been fully restored, he said.
“We assure the residents of the City of Joburg that during the shutdown Johannesburg Water will provide stationary tankers at hospitals, clinics, municipal offices, schools and police stations. There will also be mobile tankers across the city in all affected areas until the water supply is fully restored.”
The planned maintenance comes after water & sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu revealed recently that water infrastructure backlogs will cost R89.9bn per annum over 10 years, “with 3,698,074 kilolitres of water lost every single day due to infrastructure failure and leakages”.
DA shadow minister of water & sanitation Leon Basson said: “This costs SA R250m every single year.”
According to the 2022 Green Drop report by the department of water & sanitation, one-third of SA’s 1,186 water supply networks are at high to critical risk of failure. The report found that only 40% of systems met microbiological standards and 23% met chemical standards for water quality.
Besides the water cut, Joburg residents are experiencing a record number of extended power outages as a result of trips and transformer failures due to overloads on the grid caused by the extreme cold weather, which saw snowfall in parts of Gauteng.
City Power kept residents informed via its social media platforms on Tuesday, acknowledging that its operators were in various parts of the metro to restore supply.
The Ekurhuleni metro on Tuesday called on residents to use electricity sparingly, with the cold weather putting the grid under pressure.
“This situation may result in numerous power outages at a time if it remains unchecked, thus resulting in prolonged turnaround times as our teams respond to the various outages,” said metro spokesperson Zweli Dlamini.
Meanwhile, TimesLIVE reports that parts of Pietermaritzburg were left without power after many breakdowns as the cold front and snow swept across KwaZulu-Natal.
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