The Democratic Alliance in eThekwini has filed a notice of motion with the Speaker’s office, wherein it requests emergency intervention in the Tongaat water crisis (view notice of motion here).
The Tongaat area has been hard hit in recent times with the Covid-19 pandemic, riots, floods and an F3 tornado. The water crisis however goes back to almost a decade of suffering for some residents.
After the 2022 floods and the decimation of the Tongaat waterworks, residents had to wait almost a year before water was restored. Since then, the area has been hit with frequent outages occasioned by bursts on the main pumping lines. Ageing infrastructure coupled with unregulated pressure has resulted in Tongaat likely having one of the highest incidents of burst pipes in the city.
In addition, the water woes are exacerbated by the limitations on the capacity and functionality of the Tongaat Waterworks. The system is ‘pumping blind’ as there is no Scada on site to monitor reservoir levels, hence the operators are dependent on another shambolic unit, for telemetry levels. To make matters worse, there are reservoirs that also have no Scada to measure levels remotely, so dip testing is done.
With these challenges, some reservoirs were balanced where they must endure water cuts every night to build storage however a few months ago, the entire Tongaat system crashed wherein every single one of the eight reservoirs, have been unable to recover. This resulted in many suburbs going days without water, with no notice on what is causing the repeated collapses.
Speculation is rife however as EWS blames supply versus demand which has been rejected by the majority. Tongaat has seen no massive developments or population explosion overnight to warrant a system collapse.
The problem is the steady implosion of EWS. There are inadequate general workers, contractors, power tools, mechanical tools, heavy plant, Cat A plumbers, Water distribution officers vehicles and apathy from certain staff and officials, across the city.
Currently the budget and programs projections for pipe replacement and Tongaat Waterworks span more than three years. The DA rejects these time frames as the city has known for a decade what they need to fix and how soon.
The city modus of having infrastructure run to failure is unacceptable and they need to act with urgency – now. As the DA, we believe that this motion before council, places a formal obligation on city leadership to investigate with a view to invoking emergency procurement measures to bring immediate relief to Tongaat.