The Democratic Alliance (DA) in eThekwini calls for a full contingency plan following the worrisome statement by the eThekwini Municipality yesterday about Umgeni Water’s planned water supply interruption.
According to the statement, the affected areas are in Central, South and Inner West areas of the city and the interruption will be starting from Thursday, 25 February 2021 to repair a failed scour valve.
While we appreciate – as we have always argued – that our water infrastructure is completely defective and requires urgent upgrades to avoid ongoing water outages, the timing of the repairing of this valve is suspicious and comes as a surprise as it speaks directly to the city and Umgeni Water’s poor planning.
This interruption coincides with the devastating Covid-19 pandemic. To avoid contracting this deadly disease, communities are expected to regularly wash their hands, and without water supply lasting hours, this might be a challenge. This will also impact schools which have recently been opened and businesses which are nowhere near recovering from the hard lockdown.
It is our view that any amount of period without water supply during this time is going to be a public health and safety crisis.
We have written to the head of water and sanitation, Ednick Msweli, requesting information pertaining to the risk assessment that is said to have been conducted for this repair to take place at this critical period and the city’s state of readiness for this outage.
The DA has requested the water and sanitation department for a contingency plan in the event that the water outage takes longer than expected. The plan must include alternative water supply efforts such as the deployment of sufficient water tankers in the affected areas and this must be communicated to the local ward Councillors to evade another humanitarian crisis similar to the recent week-long water outage in the southern and western parts of Durban.
The DA will continue to closely monitor this situation and urge communities to use available water wisely to avoid a possible catastrophe.