R100m set aside for City Power but say they can’t be blamed for acts of God
The city's infrastructure backlog is estimated at around R27 billion as government promises action to avoid situations as were recently seen when the Eikenhof water pumping station was struck by lightning.
The recent acute water crisis brought on by lightning strikes at the Johannesburg Water Eikenhof pump station leaves water experts saying it should not have crippled the system as it did.
Wits Professor Mike Muller, water expert, engineer and strategic public and development specialist says, “When the system is working normally, a lightning strike as at Eikenhof should not interrupt supplies.
He says reservoirs are operated to ensure that there are a few hours of reserve capacity.
“But if, because of previous problems, levels are already low and there are no reserves, supply will be affected. This seems to be what happened in the current case. The combination of power failures and high ‘heatwave’ demand is not helpful.”
Spokesperson for Johannesburg Water, Nombuso Shabalala however said they were not at fault. “Lightning struck a City Power substation, which affected a Rand Water pump station. This was a water supply challenge brought on by a natural disaster which affected the infrastructure of the two utilises: City Power and Rand Water.”
City Power’s Isaac Mangena said, “City Power has put sufficient guardrails in place against lightning strikes, with the use of lightning arresters, grounding systems, surge arresters, and shielding across all substations. However, while we have these protective measures to minimise the impact of lightning strikes, they cannot guarantee complete immunity.”
He said the power supply was restored quickly after the incident.
Residents suffered water outages for days afterwards exposing the fragility of stored supply and supply restoration abilities of water entities.
The Executive Mayor, Kabelo Gwamanda said the city has, “Put aside about R100m for its electricity supply entity, City Power, to install alternative power supply infrastructure to key infrastructure that contribute to the water supply network.
Unlike ‘acts of god’ which cannot be predicted, water expert and manager at Water CAN, and Emmarentia resident Ferrial Adam says losing 46.1% of water supply due to non-revenue losses is unacceptable.
Non-revenue loss is water that is not billed for and is often lost through illegal water connections, leaks, leaky infrastructure and the like.
WaterCAN, the Water Crisis Committee and other civil society groups have been petitioning the city and water entities to not only come clean about water usage and losses but to work with them to mitigate further losses.
“The city is still not having any real engagement with civil society. Communication must go hand in hand with a detailed plan of how the city is going to tackle leaks because 25% of non-revenue water is lost through leaks alone.”
In a joint statement released by the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Senzo Mchunu and the mayor said, “The City infrastructure backlog is estimated at around R27 billion but the meeting agreed that the focus was on what could be done with the current budget as well as the new budget coming in July, further agreeing that attention was now being turned to possible private sector funding.”
This work will include
- Repairs of leaking reservoirs and tower infrastructure
- Replacement of water pipes
- Replacement of domestic and large consumer meters
- Retrofitting and removal of wasteful devices
- Enforcement of by-law enforcement including removals of illegal connections and customer bypass connections.
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