Johannesburg - Gauteng residents who have been plunged into their worst water crisis in recent history will have to endure two more weeks of dry taps. And water will be rationed.
The government hopes that by then it will have a grip on the unfolding disaster authorities have admitted they did not plan for, which has sparked mass panic and chaos in several parts of the water-starved province.
“We’re giving ourselves two weeks to make sure everything is back to normal,” Minister of Water and Sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane promised on Friday.
“To reactivate the system after there have been problems, you have to actually appreciate the challenges that have to do with the quality of your infrastructure – there are huge water demands that go with this.
“We want to humble ourselves to the people of Gauteng that this is something that has happened beyond our control but we are on top of the situation.”
She, however, warned that there were “risks” beyond the government’s control, including climate change. “Among other risks that are beyond our control are the issues related to climate change. The weather conditions, you know, that they have also affected us badly.”
The “perfect storm” of cable theft and warm weather has left three reservoirs without water and Rand Water battling to pump to high-lying suburbs for two weeks.
“We ended up with more than three of our systems down. It has not happened in more than 110 years of Rand Water,” said its chief operating officer Sipho Mosai.
“Our pipes are cross-connected, if one system gives in, so will the rest.”
Professor Mike Muller, a former director-general of the Department of Water Affairs, said: “If you don’t get the operational management and maintenance right, you can’t address these problems.
“This is a normal incident that you must expect – cable theft and for a transformer to burn out. You have got to know how to respond. There is evidence that they did not co-ordinate well enough. It’s not just Rand Water. It’s the municipalities, they weren’t planning how to deal with this. I can promise you there will be a next time, this will happen again. What matters is, are we ready when it happens?”
Professor Ashraf Coovadia, a paediatrician based at the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, which had to bring water to its wards by bucket, pleaded with the government to develop contingency plans.
“It’s very frustrating. You feel that much more vulnerable from not being able to carry out the work you need to do. Yesterday the power went out again, the generator worked for a while and then failed.
“My plea to government is that we need to look at hospitals as very vulnerable points and that if we can’t do something differently to secure power and adequate water resources, then we’re in big trouble. That’s putting health care workers at risk, patients at risk. Our hands are tied.
Professor Anthony Turton, a water scientist, described Rand Water as the “hydraulic foundation to our national economy but we’re now starting to see systemic failure in mission-critical systems”. This, he said, was driven by the lack of technical capacity in the state.
“Rand Water supplies about 25% of all SA and sustains the Gauteng economy. All we hear are excuses and blame shifting.”
Dr Chris Herold, a fellow at the SA Institution of Civil Engineering, said most of Rand Water’s supplies had to be lifted about 300m and pumped over 50km.
“All the pumps are electrical, so of course they are reliant on the integrity of the electrical power grid. A few hours or even a day’s blackout can be mitigated by storage in reservoirs. Even longer gaps in the supply to single booster stations can be partially mitigated by the cross-connections between rising mains. But we are in trouble when the power supply fails to more than one booster station for any length of time.”
Hydrologist Christine Colvin, the senior manager for WWF-SA’s freshwater programmes, said the crisis was an engineering problem linked to management.
Mokonyane said: “We need to develop a Gauteng Water master plan. We have to review the security plan of the water sector to minimise the harm.”
Water tankers would be increased and information on the schedules of redistributing water shared with the public.
* A helpline has been set up: 0860 101 060
Saturday Star