Durban - Hotel chefs have stopped adding salt to their cooking, and bottled water is selling like hot cakes because of salty, undrinkable water coming out of the taps on the South Coast.
Popular holiday destinations such as Port Shepstone, Margate and Hibberdene, as well as inland to Bhoboyi, have been affected.
The provincial government sent a technical and disaster management team to the South Coast on Tuesday, in the wake of reports about the salty tap water. Residents and visitors were using bottled water for their cooking, tea and coffee.
“We have given our guests free bottled water and it’s been a little bit tough in the kitchen; we have stopped using salt,” said Prenolan Gopaul, the executive chef of the Umthunzi Hotel and Conference Centre, north of Port Shepstone.
Gopaul received a big delivery of bottled water from his Durban supplier on Tuesday and said he was “a little worried” about the situation, hoping it would be resolved soon.
Meanwhile, local shops were doing brisk business, with customers stocking up on bottled water.
The tap water was likely to remain salty until an emergency sand berm was built across the uMzimkulu River, possibly next week, to prevent saline water entering the municipal supply.
The main water reservoir, inland of Port Shepstone, ran dry last week, forcing the municipality to pump water from the river. And as the drought tightened its grip, salty water moved upstream to the Bhoboyi treatment works. However, the municipality’s treatment processes cannot remove the salt.
Justin McRory, the chief executive of South Coast Tourism, said the tourism industry was being very water saving conscious to ensure visitors were not unduly inconvenienced.
The KZN Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) said on Tuesday that it had dispatched its technical and disaster management teams to the South Coast.
Cogta would ensure the effects of the ongoing drought were minimised and that all KZN communities continued to get water through emergency supplies, such as additional boreholes, water tankers or water pumps from alternative sources.
Ugu district councillor, George Henderson, said: “We have been getting endless questions about what is going on.”
He has seen long queues of people waiting for water tankers and when the tankers arrived they were quickly depleted.
“People are shouting and screaming, saying Ugu municipality is useless. But we have to communicate what is going on.”
Henderson said the municipality had been faced with a decision to completely cut off the water or provide salty water which the residents could use for washing and other household chores.
“The only solution is to get good rains so that we can pump out the salt,” he said.
Daily News
* E-mail your opinion to [email protected] and we will consider it for publication or use our Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below