On Thursday September 25, DA parliament members and Rand Water executives called an urgent meeting to explain the real cause of the water shortage, separating rumours from facts.
There are people phoning radio stations and claiming Rand Water owes Eskom or the metro money for electricity, and that is not true.
In fact most of the rumours are not true, and at this stage Rand Water has seen improvement, but they do not want to promise people a specific date when water will be available to everyone again.
Rand Water is still working on various scenarios before they will be able to give feedback of an exact date when water supply will be back to normal.
There are two major causes to the problem, which affected several suburbs in the Johannesburg and the metro, power challenges and high demand season, Rand Water general manager of operations, Mduduzi Mkhize explained.
- Power challenges
Power failures, insufficient power supply and theft contributed to this staggering problem because, very rarely, these obstacles occurred within a short period of time.
These obstacles created another problem because they occurred as a high demand seasonal.
- High demand season
Rand Water explained that they experience a low demand around winter and a high demand during summer, with maximum demand during August, September and January. This of course, is influenced by what people do with the water like watering gardens.
For instance, Rand Water experiences a rise in the demand during January, because that is the time when most factories and schools re-open.
- What people must know
It is a challenge for Rand Water to fill up all the reservoirs, not only because we are in a high demand season, but because as the water goes into the reservoirs, it goes out immediately because a lot of people use the water, making the increase in the reservoir not sufficient.
On top of that, the people living on the higher slopes in some of the suburbs do not get water, because a reservoir needs to be about 50 per cent full before it can supply the higher areas.
Fortunately Dr. Fawcett Ngoatje mentioned that Rand Water is currently in talks with the municipalities, and they want to have a date when all the municipalities, City Power, Eskom, Rand Water and the portfolio community could discuss this matter.
The DA said at the meeting it will be easiest if the municipalities and Rand Water can work together to control the outflow of water from the reservoir until there is enough water in the reservoirs to supply all.
So is this the first year that the water was in high demand in those months??????? I highly doubt it. So my question is isn’t there a way you can fill the reservoir quicker / manually with tankers there has to been a solution honestly!! Where are the tankers filling up in Germiston? Are they using the reservoir’s for germsiton then thats just plain DOF…
Water Crisis Update: (DAY 7) The family who have opened their gates to the community in Primrose Symhurst, are actually driving around delivering water to people who don’t have transport to get to water tanks, taking their valuable time, petrol and electricity, they even supplying the old age home in Solheim… These people surely deserve a public thanks of gratitude from Primrose citizens. Thank you so much for your caring kind hearts in our time of need.
My Father-in-law has been living in Lambton for 49 yeas, never before (even in drought time) has he been without water for so many consecutive days.
We all understand problems can occur, but when the problems reach this magnitude (unless their is a major natural disaster), it actually shows lack of management / skills and maintenance. Personally I believe, as with most things with South African’s current government, the problem is a culmination of all 3 and money been used too fill politicians personal coffers that was previously used to ensure that services like this are managed and maintained by the right (skilled) people.
So tired of the lame (non – informative) excuses. Which differ from day to day and department to department.
@Richard Totally agree with you. To the fat cats @randwater and @EMM, stop discussion how you got to this mess, get buckets and start filling the reservoirs. You are public SERVANTS not public BOSSES! Start WORKING(I know this concept will be strange for you lot to grasp) for the people.
When a problem arises, please make sure the call centre knows before hand, and they do not give people calling in different stories which promote all the nonsense