The warning issued by Johannesburg Water about water demand exceeding supply is an indicator of a system failure caused by leaking infrastructure and other issues.
On Sunday, Johannesburg Water alerted its customers that demand was breaching supply as the city has been experiencing high temperatures for weeks.
Water expert Dr Anthony Turton said: “It is a slow-moving thing. For the last three months this has been happening. It has nothing to do with the usage of water and has nothing to do with the high temperatures, though these are exacerbating factors. But they are not drivers.”
He said the warning did not, however, tell residents that half of the water that goes into the system is lost through leakages.
“With so many leaks now, to keep the basic service going, Rand Water has to put more water into the system, but because there is so much leakage in the system they can never get the pressure to the end-user. This is called system failure. The system is unable to deliver what it was designed to deliver,” he said.
Supply in the three metros getting worse
Turton said the situation of water supply in the three metros was getting worse because 42% to 46% of the water being pumped into the system gets lost through leakages.
“What is happening in Johannesburg is also going to happen in Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. Those three metros are areas of big manufacturing capabilities. The impact that this is going to have on the manufacturing sector is not known,” he said.
“In other words the whole viability of your manufacturing sector is going to be severely affected. That is the story that is going to be narrated in the coming weeks. The graph shows a steady decline over the last three months in internal storage capacity,” Turton said.
He said the bulk water supplier, Rand Water, did not have enough internal storage capacity because demand for water by all of its customers exceeded its capacity to supply.
On Sunday, Johannesburg Water urged residents to use water sparingly and comply with the Level 1 water restrictions which include prohibiting the watering of gardens between 6am and 6pm.
Water outages
A week ago, thousands of residents were left without water for about five days when a power outage occurred at Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station. One of the feeder boards at City Power experienced a flashover and this affected the dedicated transformer supplying power to the pump station. As a result, Rand Water could not pump any water.
This happened a day after a City Power transformer at the same pump station failed after it was struck by lightning.
Among the many areas affected were Soweto, Power Park, Doornkop West, Hursthill, Crosby, Crown Gardens, Aeroton, Boschkop, Honeydew, Olivedale, Cosmo City, Quellerina, Florida North, Blairgowrie and Roodepoort.
The city was forced to provide water tankers as it tried to restore reservoirs and supply to affected areas.
Turton said to solve the problem, municipalities must have competent, not politically connected, people.
“First you need to have credible leadership that is comfortable enough to bring technically competent people into their close orbit. We have to digitise the whole water supply chain. Once you digitise then you have artificial intelligence at play, warnings and automation.
“You heard that there was a valve that was closed, digitised systems would immediately pinpoint that problem,” he said.
Last week, after some Johannesburg suburbs had been left without water for nine days, Joburg Water said its technicians discovered the fault was simply a valve which had been closed and needed to be opened. That had kept some of the areas without water for longer.
Joburg Water recently revealed that water losses due to leaks in the current year amount to R1.7bn.
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