Wave of confusion: Will Tshwane 30-hour water shutdown still take place?

City of Tshwane residents were left scratching their collective heads on Monday, unsure about the status of an upcoming 30-hour water outage.

Last week, the City’s communication and marketing team alerted residents to a planned 30-hour water shutdown expected from 5am on 30 July to 11am on 31 July.

30-hour water shutdown

At the time, the City of Tshwane said its maintenance teams had to carry out repairs at the Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant.

The team will also be replacing defective valves at both the Palmiet Booster Station and the Zuikerbosch Plan.

The City said during this shutdown, the Palmiet station would “reduce pumping to 75% of its capacity”.

Here’s what you need to know.

Affected reservoirs

The impact of this maintenance work will primarily be felt by communities serviced by the Klipriviersberg, Klipfontein, Brakfontein and Hartebeesthoek reservoirs.

In turn, several areas supplied by the abovementioned reservoirs would also be affected by the outage:

Residents were also informed to refrain from watering their gardens, washing their cars, cleaning pavements, filling swimming pools and flushing toilets during this time.

Water shutdown called off

It would appear, however, that the 30-hour water shutdown has since been called off, with Rand Water assuring customers they would provide an update once the maintenance work is rescheduled.

Rand Water is sabotaging Tshwane by their lack of communication and transparency

— Koz (@Cal84311883) July 24, 2023

Regular updates are appreciated. Thank you @tshwane_mayor

— Aquaperm (@Aquaperm137575) July 24, 2023

City of Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink earlier expressed his frustration with Rand Water, saying the utility’s 11th-hour maintenance practices causes confusion.

‘Serious problem’ with Rand Water

He said prior and adequate notification of the water supply interruption could have enabled authorities to warn residents and implement contingency plans.

“We have a serious problem with Rand Water in the sense that they do maintenance work at the last minute, they don’t notify us and they don’t share the telemetry levels with us,” he said.

“So we not seeing the levels of their reservoirs and so we can’t take preventative action. We find out about problems as they occur and that is the essence of it”.

READ: Tshwane taps trickling: Residents battle ongoing water shortage