Cut water usage or else, metro warned
Municipality threatened with legal action or throttling of supply if it exceeds monthly limit
THE Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality has been threatened with forced water cuts and legal action in a scathing letter from the Water and Sanitation Department if the metro does not drastically reduce its water usage.
If the city continues to exceed its monthly allocation, its water supply will be throttled, according to the harshly worded letter from the Department of Water and Sanitation’s Eastern Cape head, Portia Makhanya.
She said the municipality had failed to cut 15% of its water consumption, despite this being gazetted two years ago.
And if it continued to do so, this would constitute a criminal offence.
Makhanya said the trend had continued unabated, in spite of at least four regulatory notices and directives – in March, April, May and June.
The municipality needs the council’s approval before it can implement punitive restrictions.
The next council meeting is scheduled for December 1.
In her letter addressed to acting city manager Johann Mettler, Makhanya wrote: “In each of these regulatory letters, it has been made clear that the failure to comply with the [National Water Act] is a criminal offence and the acting municipal manager is at risk of legal action.
“The metro continues to have high water losses and high non-revenue water, which negates and prevents good water management.
“The soft water restrictions approach, water loss reduction, water conservation and demand management and door-to-door visit initiatives are yet to show any significant improvement, let alone achieve the required 15% restriction demand required.”
She told the municipality to implement punitive water restrictions, which means residents would be charged higher rates, or penalties, for exceeding their daily limit.
Makhanya instructed the municipality to monitor water usage daily and report on abstractions to her department every week.
“Should monthly limits continue to be exceeded, [the Department of Water and Sanitation], will have no alternative but to close/throttle valves when allocations are exceeded, which may have a more serious disruption on your services than if done by the [municipality],” she wrote.
“The department, hereby, brings to your attention that failure to comply with this directive constitutes a criminal offence.
“[We] cannot allow continued disregard for our legal gazetted instructions and directives and will institute steps towards legal action if directives continue to be disregarded.”
The metro’s political head of infrastructure, engineering and electricity, councillor Annette Lovemore, said the directive was serious.
“What is very worrying is the threat to throttle valves, which means water shedding,” she said.
“It is a serious matter and we cannot ignore the directive as it would be a criminal offence.”
Lovemore said they were preparing an item about the new directive for discussion at next week’s mayoral committee meeting.
“There will be punitive measures, which means the more water you use the more you will pay,” she said.
In a letter published in the Herald today, Lovemore says that from using 50 million litres a day too much in August, the
We cannot ignore the directive as it would be a criminal offence
metro’s water usage had dropped to 39 million litres a day too much in September and then to 29 million litres too much each day last month.
“So, although we have very definitely become more water wise, we are still abstracting more water from our dams every day than we can afford,” she says.
“We therefore need to drop our usage by a further 29 million litres a day to meet our targets.
“This equates to the need for every formal household in the metro to save an extra 100 litres a day.
“We will then be on track to bring our water usage down to where it needs to be.”
Bay water and sanitation director Barry Martin said residents would be charged higher tariffs should they exceed daily limits.
“The bottom line is that we adopted softer restrictions but the usage is still high as we have not cut the 15% we were supposed to,” he said.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the Nooitgedacht water scheme has been put back a year and is now only expected to be completed in 2019.
Tenders for the final phase, meant to go out in December, only went out seven months later, throwing out the schedule of the entire project.
The final phase of the project (phase 3) is also set to cost more than initially expected, but the department has said it will fund any budget shortfall.
The municipality is still busy with the second phase, which it hopes will be finished by July next year.
Once the third phase is complete, the Bay’s water supply will rise to 210Ml a day.
In May last year, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane promised to give the metro R128-million to fasttrack the expansion of the water scheme.
She then took over the project the next month, appointing the Amatola Water Board to implement the third phase on the department’s behalf.
Last month, her spokesman said the R128-million would not be given to the municipality but to Amatola to finish the final phase.