Pretoria - Joburg Water is appealing to consumers in and around the City of Johannesburg to use water sparingly, as the utility struggles to meet demand due to the ongoing indefinite load shedding.
Speaking to broadcaster Newzroom Afrika, Joburg Water’s Puleng Mopeli said their towers are taking a severe strain.
The consumption and use of water has been heightened due to the warm temperatures being experiences in Gauteng and other parts of South Africa.
“Although some of our critical sites are exempted from load shedding, the entity is managing this through back-up systems. However, our towers are taking a strain,” she said.
“In order to maintain a steady water supply, to please observe level 1 water restrictions and reduce consumption. Level 1 water restrictions prohibit the use of hose pipes between 6am and 6pm.
“Customers are also encouraged to use grey water to irrigate or water their gardens, wash their cars or clean driveways.”
Earlier this week, Joburg’s power utility, City Power, said it is working tirelessly to address the increasing failure of its back-up batteries at several of its major substations, which is the reason for extended outages after Eskom’s bouts of blackouts.
City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said Joburg residents had recently encountered many prolonged outages following hours of load shedding, which led to an increase in outage calls from customers.
“The impact of load shedding on our fleet of backup batteries is huge, coupled with the fact that some of them are old. The batteries have an eight-hour lifespan during load shedding downtime and are meant to play back-up during the blackouts and assist when we restore power remotely,” she said.
“Rampant load shedding, especially the higher stages we find ourselves in, is exposing our aged network, especially the substation batteries.
“Most of our substations that do not come back on stream after load shedding is due to the batteries which are unable to last for a four-hour load shedding bout to enable remote switching. This is forcing us to send operators around to manually do fault finding and switch on the network.”
She said City Power had initiated a R30 million programme to ramp up the repairs of the battery system and the replacement of the old batteries to ensure the utility cut down on interruptions after load shedding.
“We currently don’t have enough budget to address all the substations, but we are moving funds around to address the most critical areas,” said Mashava.
IOL