By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Rand Water confirmed on Friday morning (July 14) that they had successfully completed planned maintenance to tie in two valves between their A19 and B14 pipelines.
The water utility stressed that it will take several days for the system to stabilise.
The outage ran from 7pm on Tuesday until 5am on Friday and affected the Eikenhof and Zwartkopjes pumping stations as well as Vereeniging and Zuikerbosch water treatment plants.
Rand Water posted a brief tweet confirming completion of the marathon project.
“The 58-hour planned maintenance project that commenced on Tuesday has been successfully completed. Rand Water is now recharging and filling up the system.
Meanwhile Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink says residents in Pretoria should brace themselves for a challenging weekend amid the ongoing water woes in parts of the metro.
The warning comes after another power trip hit Rand Water’s Mapleton Booster Pumping Station on Thursday night.
The trip impacted the water pumping capacity at Engine Room 1, the utility said on Friday.
Brink said the weekend will be a difficult one for residents.
“This is a problem that is recurring again and again. We have asked Rand Water to be candid with the public about the extent of the issues. Loadshedding is one thing. Last week we didn’t have load shedding, yet we had similar issues to this.
“My message to the people of Tshwane that are going to be affected this weekend is we are not going to go away, neither I nor the MMC’s to monitor the situation, to support the communities and to put pressure on Rand Water.
“We have asked them for two things to share their live telemetry with us, in other words, the water levels at the utility’s reservoirs. If we know when they dip below 40% we are going to have trouble. Yesterday (Thursday), we had massive water outages in Soshanguve again. Pressure turned off because clearly because there is a supply issue.”
He adds that water tankers in parts of Pretoria East will be deployed.
“We will give support, we will give information where necessary, we will deploy water tankers, but it is important that you are forearmed with this information and that water be used as sparingly as possible.
“I know that it is an irritating message to hear but these are the circumstances that we are in and we are with you and we are going to fight this thing in the long haul to make sure that we do get answers from Rand Water.”