Readers’ views
40% of our piped water lost to leaks, 6 April
Responses to
I wonder how accurate these frightening figures really are. Do the municipalities have the slightest clue how much water flows through their pipes?
A case in point: Ugu, south of Durban. Our water account for our tiny urban patch for November 2023 was R66,901.85. For 1,403 kilolitres. My wife and I and two dogs consumed 1 million 400-odd thousand litres of the precious liquid in 30 days. It had to be right, stated Ugu’s staunch accounting supervisor: “It was an actual reading.” Just pay.
There’d been a major leak early in November with a river running down the road for a day or two and dry taps for only two days (unusually prompt for Ugu).
Were we targeted to pay for the waste? (It’s hard to suppress paranoia when dealing with government.) Or did the air compressed in the pipes spin our meter’s impeller like a Formula 1 car on nitro?
Who knows? We’ve not received another water account to date.
Peter Vos
Shocking, but it would have been nice to see a water waste comparison with other countries.
Mias Nieuwoudt
The problem is that municipalities don’t allocate enough budget to repair water and sewerage lines and that operational staff in the water and sanitation departments are hamstrung by the lack of resources.
I know this first-hand because I’ve been engaging with the City of Ekurhuleni since 2018 to find and repair a water leak that wastes 174 million litres a year. The water makes its way to the natural pan of the Korsman Bird Sanctuary in Benoni, where it causes environmental problems in different ways.
But the source of the leak is still unknown and there is no budget for underground leak detection. So this leak is low on the list of priorities because it’s not in the public eye and municipal officials are under pressure to send their few allocated teams of contractors elsewhere.
The solution is political will in the councils, which pass the budgets, to take it seriously and understand that clean water is life.
Jane Trembath
The solution is not difficult. Fix leaks as soon as they are identified. Many reported leaks take weeks to be resolved. And then be proactive and identify leaks as soon as they occur by installing IOT smart water meters on every valve so you are notified as soon as there is a potential leak.
These devices can be had for as little as R2,500 each and will end up saving an enormous amount of money. A leaking toilet loses between 135 and 32,400 litres of water a day, as a simple example.
I understand that the whole water network has actually been mapped by experts, so it should not be an issue to identify how many valves there are in my metro (Ekurhuleni). But we need the political will to resolve it.
mattwell