Residents in certain areas around town have been without water for more than seven days now.
Some of them have resorted to using water from their swimming pools and are forced to buy water for consumption and cooking.
They are now demanding a permanent solution from the City of Mbombela (CoM).
One of these residents, Solly Ndaba, said, “I only buy water for drinking and cooking, because we cannot use the pool water for that. We then use the swimming pool water to bathe in and to flush the toilet, and for cleaning, because it will be expensive for me to buy water for all those things since I have big family.”
A business owner in the area, Godfrey Marule, said he had to take his guests to another establishment, because he does not have a water supply backup. This has cost his business a lot of money.
ALSO READ: Water restored to parts of Hazyview, but villages still dry
“I had guests in my apartment who were booked for a week, but after we ran out of water, I had no choice but to let them go. This was a huge loss to me. The municipality must do something about the continuing water challenges and resolve the problem for good,” he said.
The FF Plus’s councillor in the CoM, Ken Robertson, said poor maintenance of mechanical water pumps is blamed for causing chaos in Hazyview.
“Two 290kW water pumps were assigned to the Sabie River Pump Station. One pump is meant to continually pump water to Hazyview residents, while the other serves as a backup in case the first one is out of order,” he said.
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Robertson said the secondary pump was damaged about three years ago and was never replaced. In 2022, during a water crisis, the secondary pump was removed, but never repaired. At the time, residents were left without water for almost nine days.
“Now the primary pump has once again broken down due to a lack of maintenance, and there is no backup pump available to switch over to,” he said.
The CoM’s spokesperson, Joseph Ngala, was unavailable for comment by the time of going to press. However, water had since been restored to some of these affected areas.
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