Johannesburg residents were hard hit by the impending water crisis on Monday, after years of poor maintenance and lack of infrastructure build.
Johannesburg Water has confirmed more than 20 suburbs in the city’s northern and southern suburbs were affected after pipes at major reservoirs in the city burst.
Among them are parts of Bryanston, Bromhof, Olivedale, Northgate, Sonedal, Sundowner and Honeydew.
“The repair to the major burst along the outlet pipe of the Honeydew Reservoir is still receiving attention,” Johannesburg Water said on Monday.
“The extent of work required is large, but teams are attending to various aspects requiring attention. Johannesburg Water teams, contractor teams and Rand Water are on site from this morning, assessing the situation and preparing the site. Due to the massive flooding of the site, the chambers containing the isolation valves were inaccessible to close water completely overnight. However, with continuous pumping the team managed to isolate water downstream of the reservoir,” Johannesburg Water said in a statement on Monday.
Later in the day, Johannesburg Water said parts to fix the burst would be available only later this week.
This came 48 hours before the start of Johannesburg Water’s emergency planned maintenance to prevent such a crisis from unfolding.
Business Day reported recently that Gauteng may already be in the middle of a water security crisis.
The provincial government is hesitant to call it a “crisis” but the province is at a point where demand for water is exceeding supply — and unless residents begin changing their consumption behaviour, the situation will get substantially worse.
In Gauteng, water usage in the province far exceeds the national average, let alone the international one.
In August, Rand Water imposed level 1 water restrictions on the province, but its communication strategy is so weak that many residents are not aware of the restrictions or do not know what they mean.
Two weeks ago it briefed the provincial government about the severity of the problem, MEC for infrastructure Jacob Mamabolo tells Business Day. This prompted a province-wide water imbizo and instructions to all councillors in Gauteng to begin alerting their constituencies to the problem.
The water problem in Gauteng goes back to the bungling and political meddling in a crucial mega-project that would have eased the water supply challenge facing the province, whose population growth outstrips its ability to supply services.
The blame can also be laid at the door of municipalities, which for the past 15 years have underfunded the maintainance of water infrastructure across the province, neglecting one of their core functions.
Water department director-general Sean Phillips says that the problem is rooted in the near-decade-long delay to the completion of phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which was initially meant to come on stream by 2019, but due to delays caused by political interference and mismanagement is now set for completion only in 2028.
“The Lesotho Highlands Water Project was planned for 2019. If it had been completed, we would not be experiencing the severe water supply problems in Gauteng. It is now likely to be completed in 2028,” he said.
“The big underlying problem is that demand is exceeding the amount of water Rand Water can supply. We are not allowing them to extract more from the Vaal, we would be irresponsible if we allowed that ... we will only allow for that when phase 2 comes on in 2028.”
Until then, Gauteng’s water consumption has to be carefully managed.
Phillips explains that the national water department cannot allow Rand Water to extract more than a carefully managed amount of water from the Integrated Vaal river System.
The problem is the Gauteng population is consistently growing — it is now 25% more than it was a decade ago. Another problem, says an insider in the province, is that Stats SA population data is not reliable (due to reports that the latest census data consists of estimates rather than actual counts) and the population in the province is probably larger than recorded.
What are the implications of this tight leash on Rand Water?
When there is a heatwave, for instance, and residents begin filling their pools, watering their gardens and increasing their overall water usage, the reservoirs empty faster, but due to restrictions placed on it, Rand Water cannot pump more water to refill rapidly emptying reservoirs, so water levels are not where they should be.
The result of this is that there is not enough pressure to distribute water to high-lying areas, resulting in outages.
“Once Rand Water pumps water into the reservoirs again, levels increase and pressure returns. It’s an underlying problem in Gauteng,” Phillips says. Rand Water did not respond to email and WhatsApp requests for comment.
Another problem is how municipalities have been treating the provision of water over the past 15 years in Gauteng.
Going back 20 years, utilities, including water and electricity, used to be central to the business of a municipality.
Over time, however, this changed. Johannesburg Water, for instance, ran well in the first five years after its inception.
Water was also no longer ring-fenced and specifically budgeted for to allow it to be prioritised.
In many municipalities, water is now just a “technical office”, occupied by skilled engineers who know what needs to be done, however, they are not allocated the resources they need to do it.
“What you have is a situation where they only do what is crucial, naturally infrastructure is in a bad state, but it is because it is not given the priority and budgeting it deserves. Politicians would rather spend budgets on football fields and monuments which people can see, but they do not understand that the main reason for the existence of a municipality is the provision of these utilities,” says a senior official in the province who is not authorised to speak to the media.
What has suffered is all aspects of water provision.
For example, water meters are meant to be changed every 10 years.
The City of Cape Town had a budget of about R300m for this and did it regularly.
In Gauteng municipalities, the budget for meters is far less, no other city in the province has a budget that comes close to it.
The consequence is an increase in “non-revenue water” — water used but not paid for — due to faulty or broken water meters.So begins the death spiral for the maintenance of infrastructure. Poor billing leads to low collections for utilities, leading to budget cuts to crucial areas such as water and consequently poor maintenance of pipes and crucial infrastructure, leading to leaks and water losses.
Phillips says on average 33% of water in the province is lost to leaks — even before it reaches the billing stage.
To avoid water cuts between now and 2028, municipalities need to reduce leaks and campaign for their customers to use water sparingly — a huge campaign is set to be rolled out provincially, driven by the national department and the World Bank, to shift the mindset of Gauteng residents to change their water usage habits.
Mamabolo does not want to cause panic by calling it a crisis, but says if residents, businesses, municipalities and the government “do nothing”, then “we will get to crisis levels”.
He urged residents to begin water harvesting and water recycling, particularly during the upcoming hot rainy season.
With Hajra Omarjee
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