City’s ageing infrastructure bursts through the cracks
THE City’s Water and Sanitation Department wrapped up a busy long weekend after attending to several water supply disruptions and water outages across the city as poor infrastructure and maintenance kept them busy.
These incidents were a result of pipe bursts in areas such as Ocean View, Hout Bay, Blaauwbergstrand, Constantia, Parow and Milnerton. One of the most severe cases was a massive pipe burst in Simon’s Town that required the City to shut off water supply to parts of the Simon’s Town, Glencairn and Glencairn Heights areas.
Water and Sanitation Mayco member Zahid Badroodien said they attended to emergency repairs of the 375mm diameter water main that burst in the early hours of Saturday morning in Simon’s Town and water supply to the Glencairn and Glencairn Heights areas was restored on Sunday.
However, repairs to the pipeline are still in progress. Badroodien said the Water and Sanitation teams were still on site yesterday to backfill the embankment, repair the pipe and monitor the reservoir water levels and the supply to the affected areas.
Civic organisation group Stop CoCT founder Sandra Dickson said the City had been warned about the unfolding crisis for many years, yet due to lack of oversight and misplaced priorities, it chronically underspent on the maintenance of water infrastructure.
“The unabated and huge number of developments approved by the City in the last decade put the ageing water infrastructure under tremendous pressure. This overload of the water infrastructure came about largely due to new developments being merely hooked up with the already ageing water structure which was already battling to cope – hence overloading it to breaking point,” Dickson said
Badroodien said the City maintained an extensive water pipeline network city-wide and water pipe bursts occurred in different areas across the city for various reasons – including ageing infrastructure.
However, he said the City had a proactive annual pipe replacement programme, which aimed to maintain the City’s water network infrastructure through upgrades and replacement of the existing water reticulation infrastructure
Badroodien said just over R100 million was set aside in the 2021/22 financial year for this city-wide programme to replace ageing water pipeline infrastructure – there were more than 10000km of water mains in the city and a good percentage of this infrastructure was ageing.