Hot, dry summer for Joburg’s water babies
WHILE Cape Town will welcome its summer season with the re-opening of six new spray parks featuring spray cannons, dunking buckets and ground sprayers, those looking to cool off at municipal pools in Johannesburg could be left high and dry.
The doors to 15 of Johannesburg’s pools will remain shut come the traditional September 1 opening date.
City spokesman Nthatisi Modingoane said the pools needed major repairs, with those at Murray Park, east of Johannesburg, and Newville, west of the city, permanently closed due to “severe structural damage”.
Modingoane said the age of the pools meant they were susceptible to damage.
“Keep in mind that the city pools are more than 60 years old — the older they get, the more they get structural defects on a major scale,” he said.
Leaks due to cracks were a major problem.
Modingoane said a notice would be placed at all the pools that would be opening late. Pools affected include those at Zoo Lake, Lenasia Extension 10, Hofland Park, Eldorado Park Extension 9 and Jabavu.
Lucas Motolla, the acting manager of aquatics for five municipal pools — Zoo Lake, Blairgowrie, Sydenham, Kensington and Rabie Ridge — said broken tiles in the Zoo Lake pool and a broken scum channel meant it would not be opening.
“We are losing 100 000 litres of water — the leakage is very bad,” he said.
Modingoane said repairs had not been attended to during the off season. Contracts to effect the repairs had not been awarded by the panel appointed to do so because of the city’s June financial year end.
He said the remainder of the pools would be opening “as and when the contractor completes the work during the 2016-17 season”.
Motolla said the pools were important for the communities they serviced.
“It is where we teach kids from the streets how to swim so they are not involved in drugs and alcohol,” he said.
Cape Town’s 34 municipal pools were ready to receive about a million visitors over the summer season, said Anda Ntsodo, the mayoral committee member for community services.
The city has no plans to build new pools, but recently spent R18-million on six “spray parks”, which Ntsodo said were “part of our redress programme to provide quality recreational facilities for communities that were previously denied them”.
Ntsodo said water used at the spay parks was recirculated and treated through a process similar to a pool filtration system.
Cape Town’s busiest pool is in Sea Point, and it has been named by the Guardian newspaper as one of the 10 best in the world.
“Last December, it received over 50 000 visitors, with people being turned away regularly due to the pool having reached capacity,” said Ntsodo.
With Durban’s famously warm winter weather, the city did not really have an out-ofseason period, said municipal spokeswoman Tozi Mthethwa.
Forty-two of the city’s 52 swimming pools — including its popular beachfront paddling pools — are open.
The remainder were undergoing “routine maintenance”, said Mthethwa, and would be opened as soon as the repairs had been completed.
Mthethwa said three swimming pools — Durban North, Austerville and Umlazi — that were closed over the winter season to fix leaks would be open by October.
It is where we teach kids how to swim so they are not involved in drugs and alcohol