The 58-hour planned water outage in large parts of Johannesburg has commenced with many Highveld residents waking up to dry taps.
Around 21 days ago, Rand Water announced its plan to shut down water services to a number of areas in Johannesburg while it conducts a massive maintenance project.
Water supply was turned off at 7pm on Tuesday night with supply expected to return on Friday morning.
By 7am on Wednesday, Rand Water said it had successfully completed 12 hours into the 58 hours of planned maintenance, and they were still on track with the activities.
The major maintenance project involves installing valves and a portion of pipe which will enable interconnectivity of the three engine rooms at Eikenhof pumping station.
It also involved tying-in two valves between the A19 and B14 Pipelines, and the replacement of multiple valves at the Vereeniging Water Treatment Plant, Eikenhof Booster Pumping Station and Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant.
Water tankers will be available at a number of strategic points across the city, including hospitals, schools, clinics, old age homes, shopping centres and malls and police stations.
Roving tankers will also be moving around within communities for those who cannot get to standing tankers.
The South African Water Chamber said these extended hours of maintenance was “the tip of the iceberg” as there had not been diligent maintenance work on infrastructure for a long time.
Benoit Le Roy from the SA Water Chamber explained that water assets required extremely competent experts and could take between 10 to 20 years to upgrade, as massive urbanisation was not planned for.
“This exposed the lack of planning and foresight and the skills deficit we have in the country. We really need the smartest scientists, accountants, technicians and so on, to take this on.
“The load shedding issue also really topples over the broken water distribution system. Water and energy are embedded in each other and should not be dealt with as two separate subjects,” Le Roy said.
IOL