Ms Kathleen Janse van Nieuwenhuizen is one of the residents who are disgusted with the state of the water.
She posted a photo on Facebook of brown water coming out of her tap and this was met by a huge reaction from residents.
Hannes Olivier’s comment added a bit of humour to the situation, “Some people pay R1 000s for a mud bath, be grateful”.
Edward van Rensburg suggested residents should add bubble bath and then they will not see the brown bathwater. But Antoinette de Villiers Naude was not convinced this would work and said the bubbles do not even cover the brown colour.
Municipality’s administrator, Mr Theo van Vuuren, said: “The current situation in Emalahleni in respect of water quality is problematic. Since 2013 until recently we managed to improve the efficiency in water purification and could guarantee the community top quality water flowing from the purification works.
“Recently we have been experiencing a problem with dark coloured and in some cases bad smelling water. This is caused by high manganese concentrations in our raw water supply, which the staff at the purification works initially had problems dealing with. What became evident is that Witbank Dam has very high levels of manganese and there are definitely sources polluting the dam.”
The municipality is busy with investigation to try and determine what the main causes of manganese pollution are and to what extent that can be minimised.
One of the causes of the problem can be pinned on the low rainfall this season. Because of this, the flow of water is also limited and as volumes of inflow are low the manganese could not be diluted as properly as was the case over the past two years.
However, it is not just the low rainfall, mining activities also need to be looked at.
“We are also receiving spikes with extraordinary high manganese content from time to time, suggesting that there is a new source of pollution as well. As manganese comes from rocks, the most likely source will be mining activity,” Van Vuuren said.
To treat the water and reduce manganese concentrations requires a very intensive management process especially in the dosage of chemicals to reduce the levels. The chlorinators have not been installed at places on the line to make provision for this level of dosage, while filters now became clogged much quicker, leading to more backwash and therefore even reduced volumes being released. With the high levels of manganese coming in, sedimentation after application of the chemicals takes place often in the reservoirs, creating abnormal high levels of sludge.
“When we experience power outages leading to a drop in the supply of water, reservoir levels run low, allowing the sludge with high concentrations of manganese to enter the network. As we have not sufficient volumes we cannot flush the reservoirs at regular intervals at this stage to get rid of the sludge. The result of all this is that people do experience from time to time discoloured water entering their taps. This varies from day to day and depends on many factors as stated above,” Van Vuuren explained.
Good news is that special arrangements have been introduced at the water purification plant to deal with this problem. The levels of manganese on Friday, February 20 have been reduced to less than 150 units where it was more than 500 units the previous day.
Van Vuuren was hopeful that that they will have completed all process and mechanical adjustments as well as their staff arrangements to be able to manage the levels below 100 units going forward.
“We will also act on the results of the investigation on sources of pollution as we receive the results,” he said.
Not related to the manganese problem are regular occurrences of discoloured water experienced by households. This is caused by mud entering the pipe network when a pipe burst is repaired and normally will wash out quickly. Finally there are also instances where there are local pollution elements, such as water standing for prolonged periods in tanks on sites and rust in pipes on the property of the household.
“The municipality has very little control over this as these but when problems are reported it will inspect, take water samples and advise on solutions,” Van Vuuren said.
On Wednesday, February 25 water experts joined the team at the purification plant trying to resolve the manganese issue.
