Hope for end to dry taps
In some parts of Port Alfred, residents have been without water for six days as a result of a combination of the topographical factor, maintenance challenges and a contractual dispute.
Many residents were greeted at the start of last weekend with dry taps.
Ndlambe Municipality officials and ward 10 councillor Nadine Haynes have provided information about the issues on various occasions.
Ndlambe Municipality this week issued a statement saying a contractual dispute with the operator of the two megalitre (ML) reverse osmosis (RO) plant had caused the operator to suspend the service. On the other hand, the 1ML Nuwater RO plant was temporarily down for maintenance.
“There will be a meeting on
October 3 to engage Quality Filtration Systems to discuss the way forward,” spokesperson Cecil Mbolekwa said.
Port Alfred’s daily requirement is 6ML. While the supply from the Sarel Hayward reservoir had not been interrupted, less water and less pressure meant high-lying areas were not receiving water.
Challenges with maintenance and management of the reticulation infrastructure had caused interruptions to the supply, even where water was available. Talk of the Town asked the municipality about the nature of the contractual dispute, as well as when residents could expect to have their water supply restored. Ndlambe had not responded by the time of print deadline.
Wards 10 and 6 were affected by the outage and Haynes spent much of the weekend shadowing the technical team that attempted to restore the supply. She confirmed the days-long outage was due to a combination of factors. The contractual dispute that had led QFS to suspend operations was related to disagreements over billing.
Haynes was not in a position to provide details, but said, “The QFS RO Plant is expected back up fairly soon as both QFS and Ndlambe are trying to reach a compromise while their issues are under arbitration. Maintenance in the Nuwater RO Exchange is scheduled to be completed by Thursday.
In a statement earlier this week, the municipality said: “We [request] all residents to be patient about nonavailability of water in most areas and those residents living in low-lying areas are urged to use water sparingly to allow high-lying areas to get water.”