PARTS of Doonside and surrounding areas are still without water after a pipe, situated underneath a house near the top of School Road, burst on Sunday, 3 March.
The burst pipe was finally repaired in the early hours of this morning, Tuesday, 5 March but due to the system filling slower than expected, tanker deployment has been extended.
Read the previous update: Doonside water outage: Dwelling set for demolition to reach burst water main
“The repair to the line was completed at 1:26am and thereafter valves were opened to allow water into the system. Noting that the rupture was only 200m from the Umgeni supply, the entire network, including the School Road reservoir, was completely depleted,” explained Ward 97’s Cllr Beetge, who was instrumental in assisting with the situation in Ward 109.
“The gravity feed system will take several hours to full with water first going to the lowest areas near the coast but then only to the pressure relieve valves (PRV) before backing up into the reservoir with an operating level of 1.5 m, at which time the pressure would be sufficient to force the PRV valves open to full capacity and let water through, in turn effecting the reservoir level.
Should the department bypass this process by introducing pressure in an attempt to speed up the distribution, the risk of further ruptures remain and thus renewed outages.”
Beetge explained that at 9.30am the reservoir level measured 500mm, which could in turn be affected by usage from those households that are already at receiving level.
“Once the piping system is full, followed by the reservoir, there could still be some houses without water and then usually in ‘dead ends’ where PRV (commonly referred to as fire hydrants) are located. This as a result of air pockets that are created and then ‘pushed’ forward by the water influx to the point where PRV are opened to bleed air from the system (so expect to see hydrants with water running from them later on as air is released),” he said.
Cllr Beetge said that due to the system filling slower than expected, authorities have already requested extended tanker deployment.
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