Load shedding blamed for recent brown water supply in large parts of Cape Town

A glass of tap water. File picture: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters.

A glass of tap water. File picture: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters.

Published Aug 8, 2022

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Cape Town - Although City of Cape Town customers were exempt from load shedding this weekend, the continued sporadic power outages led to a process control fault at the Faure Water Treatment Plant (WTP) which then led to discoloured water in the distribution network.

On Friday, residents across large areas of Cape Town (including Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu and Lansdowne) were advised to boil tap water before using it, use household bleach to disinfect water or use water disinfection tablets during the period that the cautionary boil notice was released.

While the boil notice was lifted on Saturday evening, water and sanitation mayco member Zahid Badroodien said the plant was undergoing a three-day cleaning process with ongoing water quality tests to guide when it could resupply the city.

“A number of water samples taken from the network were analysed. It was found that no E coli nor coliform bacteria were detected and therefore there is no acute risk detected in the water within the distribution network at this moment.

“Sampling shows the water quality complies with national standards for drinking water (SANS 241), and is safe for consumption,” Badroodien said.

Senior lecturer from the Department of Global Health at Stellenbosch University, Dr Jo Barnes, said when water was discoloured, the automatic safety precaution was that such water could carry disease-causing organisms.

“Bacteria, viruses… piggyback on to the particles that cause the discolouration and bypass the faulty purification processes – such water carries real health risks,” Barnes said.

Barnes told Cape Argus that this failure should be seen as a wake-up call, and the same remark went for all situations where system failures occurred as a result of load shedding.

Sandra Dickson, from lobby group Stop CoCT, said load shedding, which was steadily becoming more severe, has been a reality for more than a decade and therefore the City has had ample time to implement a solution to ensure uninterrupted power supply at its water treatment and sewage plants.

Dickson said the City prided itself on its aim to rid Capetonians from load shedding, but it failed to prioritise and safeguard a basic service delivery issue such as uninterrupted functioning of water and sewage plants.

Badroodien said permanent generators have been fitted at 85 of the larger priority water and sewer pump stations as a measure to increase the resilience of water and sanitation supply systems.

“At the Faure water treatment plants, load shedding caused a fault in the de-watering unit process, which cannot be powered by the standby generator due to extremely high energy demand,” Badroodien said.

The City has applied for a load shedding exemption of the Faure WTP on the basis that the standby generator does not power up the equipment required for the water treatment residue removal – Eskom was still considering this submission.

On Sunday, Eskom announced stage 2 load shedding was suspended but that the generation system was still vulnerable to breakdowns and load shedding may be required.