Filling up a glass of water
Water supplier Rand Water has hit back at Gauteng Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Solly Msimanga over its alleged poor communication from Rand Water about planned outages between April 1-3.
Msimanga made these remarks during the launch of his party’s Water Crisis Campaign on Thursday.
He said Gauteng residents will continue to suffer for days on end without water because Rand Water hasn’t supplied water tanks to the affected areas.
“Gauteng residents are faced with a severe water crisis due to Rand Water’s incompetence and failure to provide water tankers to the affected residents during the water outages caused by the maintenance of water infrastructure.”
“The residents will be placed in a dire situation as municipalities do not have sufficient water tankers to provide water to the affected areas. The DA has been reliably informed that the Provincial Disaster Management does not have water tankers to assist municipalities to provide water for the affected residents,” Msimanga said.
Rand Water said it has taken note of Msimanga’s comments and has without fail, communicated to the customers whenever there are planned as well as emergency supply interruptions.
“Contrary to what Mr. Msimanga states, Rand Water has had a successful meeting with the Executive Mayor of Johannesburg recently where issues of communications were explained and well understood by the Executive Mayor who further advised how to improve on communications going forward. We welcome the leadership of the Executive Mayor of Johannesburg to this effect.”
Rand Water said it provides water to its customers in bulk and the responsibility of reticulating water to the consumers rests with the metros and municipalities.
Rand Water has also refuted Msimanga’s claims that he visited any of the water suppliers facilities.
“Mr. Msimanga further makes a call that the water infrastructure must be declared National Key Points (NKPs). Mr. Msimanga refers to a shocking discovery when he visited Water Treatment Plants where he suggests that plants he visited were not NKPs. We wish to state that Mr. Msimanga has never visited any of our Water Treatment Plants. We further wish to put on record that all our Water Treatment Plants are indeed National Key Points.”
Rand Water also said it does not have any asbestos pipes in its network and are found in the metros and municipal networks.
ALSO READ: Tips and advice to keep your devices from being hacked
