Vandals cause water outage

ALMOST the entire Port Alfred and Nemato have been up in arms this week over low water pressure or no water at all in certain areas.

TotT’s Facebook group received numerous posts from people complaining about the lack of water.

TotT had received and posted an alert from Ndlambe Municipality on Monday about the outage affecting Nemato and other high-lying areas.

Municipal spokesman Cecil Mbolekwa said the outage was caused by Eskom power breakages at the pump station.

He said trucks would distribute water in affected areas and municipal staff were working hard to restore flow.

But the problem persisted and became more widespread on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning, deputy director of infrastructure Onke Sopela said the inlet to the balancing dam, where raw water is stored, had been vandalised.

“Our team managed to fix that immediately but there was a problem of water not coming into the balancing dam that then caused the dam levels to drop drastically, and that also affected the supply of the treatment plant,” Sopela said.

“Levels at the storage reservoir dropped as far as 60% and that affected the high lying areas in town. The township [Nemato] was the first to be affected,” he said.

“Our teams are working day and night to make sure that we restore the situation to normal.”