A VIEW OF THE WEEK: You survived load shedding, what about a water crisis?

A tsunami is coming … and it will be a dry one.

As South Africa celebrates nearly 200 days since the end of rolling electricity blackouts, recording a day without water outages is becoming harder.

From areas in the country where taps are nearly permanently dry to major city suburbs where water is diverted with little to no warning.

Like the electricity crisis before, water issues have been a reality for the poor for many years. But, as in Cape Town in 2018, Nelson Mandela Bay in 2022, and other regions more recently, when it impacts those in more affluent cities and areas alarms ring out loudest.

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Rushing to restrict during a crisis

Residents pay little attention to warnings of possible shortages, refuse to change their habits, and are then outraged when these predicted outages occur.

Not distracted by the fight to keep the lights on, municipalities now face the reality of decades-long dwindling water supplies they largely ignored.

They play down the seriousness of the issues until we are in the danger zone, then rush to implement water restrictions.

The eThekwini municipality in KwaZulu-Natal recently reached the limit it could draw from dams and announced several measures to save water over the next year this week. These include possible water rationing or water shedding.

It came as Rand Water in Gauteng revealed that the province’s three metros have exceeded their water allocation for over a year.

With increasingly unpredictable weather, and warm dry spells in the summer season ahead, the situation could get worse.

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What stage are we on?

The Department of Water and Sanitation has reassured residents they have a plan to keep water flowing in Gauteng and the Free State during the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) maintenance shutdown that began this week.

This plan will depend on residents and municipalities working together to save water. Based on how they have been doing so far, this is unlikely to happen.

Municipalities have learnt lessons from previous Day Zeros and the energy crisis by rushing to clamp down on illegal water connections and prioritise revenue collection.

But this must be intensified urgently or the water disasters across the country will become a nationwide pandemic.

And you’ll need an app to check what stage of water shedding we are on.

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