By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Water utility Rand Water will be carrying out maintenance on the water supply system on the City of Ekurhuleni’s systems this weekend, from 6pm on Friday, 26 May, until 5am on Monday, 29 May.
The water board will implement planned maintenance on its M9 pipeline to undertake tie-in connection to the existing M8 pipeline. This will improve provision of water to the Brakpan Reservoir, it said.
The water utility said that taps would run dry from this Friday at 6PM until next week Monday.
It said that the city would deploy water tankers to all affected areas.
Some hospitals, clinics, schools and retirement homes have been urged to start filling up their water storage tanks before the planned maintence starts on Friday evening.
The following municipalities will be impacted, as they are fed from the Brakpan Reservoir:
- City of Ekurhuleni
- Victor Khanye Local Municipality (Delmas)
- Govan Mbeki Local Municipality (Secunda)
- Lesedi Local Municipality (Heidelburg)
- Winkelhaak Mines
These municipalities and the mines will not have water supply from Rand Water during the maintenance duration.
“Planned maintenance is necessary to ensure continuous future provision of water to our customers. We apologise for any inconvenience that may be caused by the implementation of the maintenance project,” Rand Water said.
The City of Ekurhuleni has issued its own alert over the planned outage, noting that the following reservoirs and all areas they feed will be impacted:
- Duduza;
- Nigel;
- Springs;
- KwaThema; and
- Brakpan.
“In essence, this means that all areas supplied from these reservoirs will be without water as a result. The City will be providing roving water tankers to mitigate the impact, but residents are encouraged to store enough water for basic use during the stoppage,” said city spokesperson, Zweli Dlamini.
“Industrial customers including hospitals, clinics, retirement homes and schools are encouraged to fill up their internal storage tanks and use water sparingly until the system has fully recovered.”
The city said it has arranged two metered filling points for industries in Springs and Brakpan for the companies to fill up water using their own tankers.
“It must be noted that the estimated recovery of the system after the stoppage will be between three and five days.”
The other affected municipalities have also warned that water outages may persist for longer than the planned maintenance time as the affected reservoirs will take time to refill.