Water finally returns to Joburg’s South Hills residents after two-week outage

Joburg Water said the outage could be due to several factors

The water woes in South Hills, Johannesburg, have come to an end for now after residents faced a two-week outage when the supply in the South Hills Towers reservoir was depleted.

The sudden outage hit wards 56 and 57 earlier this month, affecting a primary school, four old-age homes and an orphanage, with residents and councillors left in the dark about the cause.

Wards 56 and 57 councillors Mike Crichton and Faeeza Chame met with officials from Joburg Water this week. They said water returned to taps on Thursday but a few streets experienced low pressure.

Joburg Water said it was working on the South Hill Tower's network and all should be stabilised soon, Crichton said.

“The water is back and we hope it stays that way,” he said.

The councillors are uncertain what caused the problem, but are concerned the reservoir could have been deliberately damaged.

“What we noticed is that there seems to be vandalism. Most of the valves were turned off instead of being opened. No normal person has tools to close the valves,” Chame said.

Crichton said what they saw was of concern, as only someone with knowledge of how the infrastructure worked could tamper with the valves. “That is when we started to be concerned about an element of sabotage. We don’t have proof yet that it is sabotage,” he said.

Last Sunday night, the reservoir abruptly rose to 65% capacity from zero to 1% capacity that morning, but by Monday morning the water was out again.

For more than a week, councillors and residents could not understand the reasons, stating Joburg Water’s explanations were vague as they spoke of high demand. “That doesn’t make sense because how can there be high demand for water when there was no water at all,” said Crichton.

Joburg Water told TimesLIVE the water supply to South Hills Tower came from Rand Water’s Kliprivierberg reservoir, which has been low and fluctuating as it supplies several other storages beyond Joburg Water.

Spokesperson Nombuso Shabalala said demand has been higher than available capacity.

“With these many reasons, the tower was unable to supply to its water supply zone. However, Joburg Water investigated all other possibilities that could contribute to inadequate inflow, which include but are not limited to bursts and/or open zone valves. Joburg Water is continuing with the exercise of inspecting valves,” she said.

Crichton said prolonged water outages have been an annual occurrence in the area for the past four years.

Shabalala said the instances were due to high demand and fluctuating Rand Water reservoirs.

“There have also been other reasons that may have impacted the inability of the tower to have adequate levels such as the pumps not working, bursts on the inlet supply, or valves which have been opened, causing water to escape to other areas. But these incidents may have been intermittent and over very short spans,” she said.

Crichton suspects the high demand for water could be attributed to the number of leaks and burst pipes that plague the ward and were not attended to timeously.

“What infuriates me, as a councillor, is the amount of water that is wasted by Joburg Water. I am continuously reporting and escalating burst pipes and leaks and their response has been inadequate,” he said.

“When they say ‘high consumption’, I think the leakages are the big contributor. In April I raised alarm bells about the leaks and water wasting and I said they should intervene and fix the leaks to prevent a crisis from happening.

“Sadly the response wasn’t what was needed — and here we sit.”

TimesLIVE