A public consultation meeting was held at the Port Shepstone Civic Centre, to engage with the community and explain the intentions and objectives of the Umzimkhulu River Weir and Pipeline project last Thursday.
At the same time designs of the project were available for scrutiny.
Sizwe Malinga, the manager at the water services department at Ugu District Municipality said the design also needs to demonstrate how the environment will be impacted.
Ugu along with Nemai Consulting (Pty) Ltd, which was appointed as the Environmental Impact Assessment practitioner that consists of civil and structural engineers and environmental specialists presented the project to the community.
“We have presented the full scope of the project, so we are now awaiting feedback from the community, to accept the project or table their concerns if there are any,” said Malinga.
Donavan Henning of Nemai Consulting said the motivation for the project is to supply 24 Ml/d additional water to the system, based on the licensed abstraction volume, capacity of the Water Treatment Works and the current shortfall, to align with regional master planning to meet the projected system demand for 2050, to provide a permanent defence against river vagaries and sea water rise with associated salt water ingress.
“It is also to provide stable flooded suction to achieve better efficiencies and energy saving (modern) river pumping abstraction with only two duty pumps (with 100% backup pumps), as opposed to five duty pumps required to achieve the 88.5 Ml/d average. Also, to provide a fixed abstraction point new inlet structure and weir spillway, which will ensure steady supply when the river meanders during low flows and tends to bypass the abstraction point.”
The draft scoping report is available for public review from January 16 until February 16, 2023. It can be accessed as a hardcopy at the municipal library at 10 Connor Street, Port Shepstone and an electronic copy at https://nemai.co.za/downloads/.
Written comments should be forwarded to donavanh@nemai.co.za
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