COUNCILLORS Hassan Haniff and Chris Pappas have taken the city’s water department officials to task over the length of time it took to fix a burst pipe in Overport.
According to the counillors the burst waterpipe was reported on Crescent Street at around 8pm on Sunday, 4 November.
The municipality immediately issued a reference number but only got to the burst pipe after 8am on Monday, 5 November.
After a few hours of digging the plumber left the scene at about 2.30pm and the next shift arrived on site around 6pm on Monday.
They said by 12am on Tuesday they were finished with repairs but had to wait until 10am on Tuesday for backfill to arrive. Water was slowly restored at around 10.30am on Tuesday.
ALSO READ: Sydenham, Overport, Musgrave water woes prompt calls for pipe replacement
Arrangements were made for water tankers to assist residents during the outage.
“Each one of these tankers costs R30 000 to call out. The longer the outage, the more money is spent to call out more and more tankers. This money could be used to fix parks or even replace old pipes, but they are neccesary especially during long outages,” he said.
“This was a simple burst and could have been done very quickly. It is unacceptable that it took more than 38 hours for water to be restored,” said Pappas.
Councillor Haniff expressed his growing frustration at the frequency of waterpipe bursts in Overport.
“The infrastructure is old and needs to be replaced. Old asbestos and iron pipes should have been replaced many years ago,” explained Haniff.
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