Water crisis in Breyten amid promises of relief

BREYTEN – Residents have reported they have gone without water for nine weeks, amid the municipality’s assertion last week in Highvelder that the Warburton Greater Breyten Water Scheme is well under way and holds a lot of promise.

The paper reported that Msukaligwa’s executive mayor and an entourage had inspected the site.

Under the condition of anonymity, a resident said while the prospect of future relief is wonderful, the current situation is intolerable for those in the higher-lying areas.

Highvelder spoke to several residents in this area to gain a better understanding of the gravity of the situation. Some of them wished to remain anonymous.

“Breyten has major water problems, we only have water for maybe half of the year if we’re lucky. On top of that, load-shedding and load reduction exacerbate the situation,” a resident said.

She also said that in the nine weeks they were experiencing these outages, there were no water trucks in sight.

“There were tankers before this, but the water had a foul odour we believe made it unfit for human consumption. We only used it to flush the toilets. We must now devise our own water management strategy. We bring containers to the guest houses or to the mosque’s tap they have installed to collect clean water for basic activities such as bathing, cooking, and cleaning.”

Another resident claimed that after being without water for the umpteenth time, he was forced to install a JoJo tank. He said, however, the municipality would not give him water for the tank and said he had to pay for it.

“Why should I pay for water when I have no idea where it comes from? It’s almost a certainty that it’s dirty, and I’ll have to clean my JoJo tank once the water returns. I also don’t expect them to fill it to the brim, we just need enough so our family can survive until the tankers return,” he said.

Read the complete article in Highvelder.