Last year’s glitches that resulted in almost a month long interruption water supply interruption in parts of the Germiston and Gauteng as a whole has posed a challenge to all municipalities to better prepare themselves for such incidents.
Rand Water is the contracted service provider for the entire metro and has supplied water to the province without fail since 1906.
No one could have anticipated a challenge such as the one experienced during 2014.
In this regard, the metro is working on a future water management plan which, it hopes, will cater for such events.
One component in the plan is the exploration of an early warning system which would be used to indicate dropping water levels in the metro’s storage reservoirs and allow for speedy intervention.
This will be achieved through a telemetric type system that will synchronize all reservoirs throughout Ekurhuleni, making it easy to divert water from one supply zone to another.
This process will include the harmonisation of the metro’s underground infrastructure, so that municipal potable water supply zones are aligned to enable the distribution of potable water from one supply zone to another, where practically possible.
It has been reported that the metro is currently working on constructing two additional water reservoirs, in Palm Ridge and Etwatwa Extension 19, which are expected to be completed in the 2016/2017 financial year.
The metro will also pull out all the stops to ensure that more portable storage water reservoirs are built by the year 2021, in anticipation of future supply risk and population growth due to urbanisation.
Furthermore, the construction of the above-mentioned two storage reservoirs which will add additional water storage capacity soon is already in an advanced stage of planning.
Germiston was one of the hardest hit during the potable water challenges, in September 2014, and a dedicated feeder line to the existing Russell Road reservoir will be in place before the end of the 2015/2016 financial year.
“South Africa is, by its nature, a semi-dessert area, and Gauteng was built far from natural dams in the chase for mining prosperity, which calls on everyone in the province and metro region in particular to use water sparingly, curtailment of dripping taps and report any visible leakages,” said Themba Gadebe, the spokesman for the metro.
The municipality will augment these interventions by intensifying the implementation of the water conservation and water demand management programmes.
Other articles on water:
When will the water normalise?
Many Germiston residents have been affected by the sudden interruption in the water supply.
