Glenhills resident Omesh Maharaj writes:
Last year, through your newspaper, I raised the serious water problems we’ve been experiencing for the past 20 years in Sagittarius Close in Glenhills.
The response from iLembe District Municipality’s Elias Bhengu at the time was totally inadequate.
Our water outages have become worse over the past six months, with no proper explanation by the municipality.
As I’m writing to you today (27 January), we have not had a single drop of water from our taps for the past five days. Despite this, we still receive exorbitant water bills.
Lately our water supply stopped at around 5am and returned at around 9pm every day. That at least gave us an opportunity to store water for the next day, but that has now completely stopped.
Numerous calls to the municipality from residents and our councillors Thembinkosi Nxele and Rishi Pooran, have fallen on deaf ears.
Bhengu blames the contractor currently doing an upgrade in the area. The contractor told Pooran he hasn’t interfered with the water supply to the affected areas in any way.
The municipal team obviously cannot figure out where the problem lies. Other areas around us have water judging by the many visible water leaks, but we have nothing.
Our wish is that the municipality would treat this as a matter of urgency.
iLembe District Municipality’s KwaDukuza Operations Manager, Elias Bhengu, responds:
The background to the water supply challenges in Glenhills is that the ageing infrastructure results in many leaks, which then results in shortage of supply to some consumers.
To respond to these challenges, the district municipality, through its Technical Services Department, was to first replace the ageing infrastructure, and due to the vastness of the area (wards 13, 16 and 26), the project was carved into two.
The first project is underway and 90% completed. Upon its completion this will eliminate quite a number of leaks, especially in ward 13.
The reduction of these leaks will automatically increase the amount of available water, especially to Sagittarius Road and other roads with similar challenges.
Last week, a technical services assessments suggested water supply has improved in some areas, such as Murugan Road, and also on Sagittarius Close.
The contractor is currently transferring house connections onto the new mains. This changeover will enable the municipality to drastically reduce leaks as indicated above.
While the contractor replaces the old pipes, technical services teams are also repairing leaks.
The municipality is hopeful that more headway will be made in the near future, especially since the purchase of its own fleet of 65 new vehicles.
Letter shortened – Ed
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