Residents of Zinkwazi Beach are fed up with municipal excuses as their water woes seem to be dragging on without an end in sight.
Zinkwazi has long suffered from water outages, with some dry spells lasting days on end.
Earlier this month many homes were without water for four days.
“Most of the residents are upset over the lack of service delivery in the village and can still clearly remember the 25 outages which included 14 consecutive days without water last year,” Zinkwazi resident JP Cillie told The Courier.
Despite meetings between locals and Ilembe Municipality, residents still experience water outages on a near weekly basis.
In fact, the Zinkwazi Beach Residents and Ratepayers Association (ZBRRA) let members know that water had been shut off earlier in June due to Ilembe not paying Eskom, which led the power supplier to cut electricity to the water reticulation system.
Ilembe Municpal communications manager Zee Nqala confirmed this.
“The Eskom disconnection incident was on the 13th of this month (June) and it was resolved the following day,” said Nqala.
However, clerical and payment errors aside, Cillie said that it did not seem as if Ilembe has done any work on the water reticulation system.
“I did a walk again in and around the reticulation system and compared it to the report from 2016, I cannot seem to see any improvements by Ilembe. There is still only one duty pump installed and the standby pump is still a mess,” he said.
Nqala said that Ilembe is currently still using boreholes to supply Zinkwazi.
“This will be discontinued once the Lower Thukela Bulk Scheme pipeline is fully commissioned. The commissioning is underway and once all the leaks identified are fixed, the supply to Zinkwazi will have less interruptions.”
However, Cillie and other residents are worried that this will not be enough.
“The problem I have with that is that less and less maintenance will be done on the infrastructure and just more leaks will appear draining the Tugela River.”
For the time being though, it appears that Zinkwazi residents will have to tough it out – perhaps they can give the Capetonians a few tips on how to survive without a water supply.
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