Bay water crisis dips to ‘disaster’ status

Metro starts declaration process as department threatens to close valves

AS Nelson Mandela Bay’s water situation heads toward crisis levels – with dams reaching the dreaded 45% mark – the municipality has started the process to have the city declared a water disaster area. It has also emerged that the metro is operating with only half of the required maintenance workers needed to address thousands of leaks.

Adding to an already dire situation, the metro has again been rapped over the knuckles by the Department of Water and Sanitation for not drastically reducing water usage in the Bay.

The department, which has again threatened to close the valves and implement forced water shedding, is demanding that the municipality explain why it has not cut the city’s water usage by 15% as instructed.

This was revealed at a portfolio committee meeting on Friday by the metro’s infrastructure, engineering and energy political head, Annette Lovemore.

She said Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane’s department felt there had been insufficient effort on the municipality’s side to curb water wastage or leaks.

A report tabled at the same meeting, revealed that although there had been a slight improvement, the metro’s efforts to reduce leaks were not yielding the desired results.

It only managed to reduce leaks by 1.2% between December and January.

The amount of water lost through leaks, technical losses and wastage amounted to 31.6% of all water consumed in January.

The metro has implemented strict water restrictions in an effort to cut consumption by 15%.

With the dam levels reaching a combined average of 45.42% on Thursday, Lovemore said the municipality had put plans in motion to have the council declare the Bay a disaster area.

An item would be sent next month to the mayoral committee to ask that it declare the metro a disaster area.

“We will present the item on the disaster declaration to the mayoral committee on April 19 and it will go to the council on May 4,” Lovemore said.

“This declaration will not mean that we will get funding from the national government, but it will mean we can bypass some procurement processes to address the issue of water.”

She urged municipal officials to advise the Department of Water and Sanitation against water shedding.

“I understand that in the directive dated February 17, the department is again threatening to throttle the valves, which is really serious,” Lovemore said.

“Are we talking to them about this? I think we must fight that it does not happen.

“If we have infrastructure that is poor and fragile, what they are planning to do will collapse it totally.”

The municipality’s director of water and sanitation, Barry Martin, said the national department received weekly updates on the water situation in the metro.

“There is a systems analysis done on the available water storage which also looks at the current dam levels,” he said.

“We must be real about this issue. Water is not electricity.

“Even if you say now ‘implement water shedding’, there are hundreds of valves to turn on a daily basis,

“That alone would be a problem and would probably waste water more. We have cautioned them [department] about this.

“Water shedding would be detrimental to the system,” he said.

ANC councillor Andile Mfunda said the water situation was getting worse and accused officials of not implementing decisions to curb losses.

“One of these days we will wake up and there is no water in this city,” Mfunda said.

“We have got good plans but we don’t implement them. This is a very serious matter.

“If we don’t take a political decision, I am telling you history will judge us harshly.

“Officials must implement decisions taken

by the council to address the issue of water leaks.”

Mfunda said the council had approved a plan to allocate five plumbers to each ward, but that had not yet been implemented.

Infrastructure and engineering executive director Walter Shaidi said the plan was impossible as there was no funding to employ 300 plumbers. “We are in a process of getting more plumbers,” he said.

“We have shortlisted for six artisans and hope that by the end of the financial year [June 30] those posts will be filled.”

It also emerged on Friday that the city is still struggling to attend to a backlog of water leak complaints by residents.

Between July and last month, the call centre received more than 20 000 complaints about leaks. Of these, 12 653 had been addressed and 7 914 still had to be seen to.

Shaidi said the maintenance teams should each comprise 16 members but had only eight.