Burst water pipe causes inconvenience to motorists and pedestrians on Louis Botha Avenue

Resident and community activist from Houghton Estate, Brendon Naicker has said something needs to be done urgently about the ageing water infrastructure in the City of Johannesburg.

A water pipe that supplies Houghton Estate and Orange Grove recently burst in front of Naicker’s house gate, resulting in flooding and inconvenience to motorists on the busy Louis Botha Avenue. The flooding led to traffic queuing down from the s-bend mural to Orange Grove with some motorists opting for other routes to reach their destinations. “Something needs to be done with our water infrastructure. This pipe burst is proof of the state of our water infrastructure. It is sad that we’ve made calls to our local authorities to have road signs installed to warn motorists when approaching this bend,” Naicker said.

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“Every year there is a car that will crash into the wall or overturn because there are no road signs. The pipe burst just added to an inconvenience that already exists and made things worse for motorists and pedestrians using the road. We were lucky that no car crushed into our wall this time.”

Ward 73 councillor Eleanor Huggett also blamed the city’s more than a 40-year-old infrastructure for the recent pipe burst. “The pipe bust was due to an ageing water supply system that has not been upgraded or repaired for over 40 years. Our water infrastructure needs an upgrade and repair. The pipe was however successfully fixed on the same day by Joburg Water team and everything went back to normal,” Huggett said.

Joburg Water spokesperson, Isaac Dhludhlu agreed that the utility’s infrastructure needs to be replaced to avoid more pipe bursts. “Johannesburg Water has 12 069 kilometres of water pipes and 11 621 kilometres of sewer pipes across the City of Johannesburg. The infrastructure is old and needs to be replaced on a regular basis to reduce the number of bursts per kilometre. We have an obligation to replace a water infrastructure of 274 km ageing pipes and sewer infrastructure renewal of 160 km in the 2020/21 financial year. Our overall infrastructure backlog budget is over R10 billion,” Dhludhlu said.

Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) spokesperson Zoleka Jika could not respond to the questions sent to her on why there were no road signs along Louis Botha Avenue. Zoleka was contacted via phone call, email and WhatsApp. Despite an assurance that she would respond once she had spoken to those responsible for signage, the North Eastern Tribune received no comment by the time of publication.

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