Joburg Water explains low water pressure in recent weeks

Residents have been enquiring about the reduced supply of water recently in several areas like Westdene, Melville and the surrounding suburbs.

Johannesburg Water spokesperson Nolwazi Dhlamini said, “Over the past few weeks, we have experienced reduced supply into our reservoirs, partly due to the vandalism of the City Power Orlando Substation recently, which feeds Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station. This caused water outages in multiple suburbs across the city, including, but not limited to, Melville, Emmarentia, and Auckland Park areas.”

“Although this has been repaired, our system is slow to fully recover as various other reservoirs within the City of Johannesburg had also run dry in this process and are currently gradually recovering.”

Following that, a City Power transformer at the Brixton substation caught on fire. This, again, subsequently affected Johannesburg Water’s Brixton, Hursthill, and Crosby reservoir systems.

“There have also been operational challenges which we sometimes experience from Rand Water which affects our reservoirs,” said Dhlamini.

She says when an interruption of water supply occurs, even when pumping is restored it will take time for the entire system to recover. “The water network system is huge. Thus, once pumping is restored, the process starts for Rand Water to recover their reservoirs first- after which Johannesburg Water’s reservoirs will be restored. This process takes time because Johannesburg Water systems are intrinsically linked to Rand Water, City Power, and Eskom, and we need electricity for our infrastructure to function.”

A spokesperson for Rand Water, Makenosi Maroo explained that an electrical failure affected pumping to the Eikenhof pumping station. “This affected all of the reservoirs that the station supplies, but supply was restored the same day. We are exempted from load-shedding at our primary and secondary pumping stations. However, we do experience power trips, not load-shedding. We are not certain what caused the power failure recently but did call in our power supplier to investigate and rectify the problem.”

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