BARBERTON – Residents are experiencing severe water shortages in some sections. Community members of Extension 11 in Umjindi allegedly had to drink water contaminated with sewage last Friday. One of the residents, Ms Thembelihle Mathonsi retailed the events to Mpumalanga News.
“I was happy that I would have plenty of water to do my laundry and I started to fill my buckets. I noticed an unpleasant smell from the tap water. At first I thought it was mud, then my neighbour came to me and complained about the same thing. “We decided to let the water run for a few seconds, hoping that maybe the water would clear up. It was then that human waste started trickling out of the tap,” she explained. Some of the community members consider this an insult. One of the residents said, “We understand that there is a crisis of water in our township, but what is happening to us now is nonsense. “Does this mean we voted to drink human waste? Even the water trucks are not doing us justice. I wish it could be summer so that we could have enough clean water in our rivers and in the taps too.” After the incident the community members approached the City of Mbombela Local Municipality.
In some parts of this area, residents are allegedly not paying municipal services and survive by making illegal sewerage connections. The spokesperson of the municipality, Mr Joseph Ngala confirmed that they were aware of this matter. “We are aware of this and as I am speaking, the Department of Water and Sanitation is already on the ground to find out what went wrong. There are illegal sewerage connections. It might be that those connections linked to the main water pipe are the cause,” he said.
Ngala said for safety reasons, the community in this section was urged not to use tap water and provided them with Jojo tanks. Water trucks will be of assistance to ensure that all households have water.
Ngala concluded, “At this stage, we are still waiting for the results, as we took some of the samples to the laboratory, but you can confirmby the look that it was not clean,”.
