Durban — eThekwini Municipality mayor Mxolisi Kaunda said he was confident the Tongaat Water Treatment Works would be completed by the end of October.
Kaunda was speaking during a media briefing on an update to appoint a permanent city manager on Tuesday.
The Tongaat Water Treatment Works were destroyed during the deadly April flooding while other parts of the city such as Isipingo are still suffering the consequences.
Kaunda said they were pleased that currently, the repairs on the plant were sitting at over 15%.
He said this would allow for the full restoration of water supply in affected areas in Tongaat.
“Last week, we conducted an oversight visit to the plant to assess the progress we are making on repairs.
“The plant has been stabilised and work has begun on the new power station that will assist with pumping water from the plant to more than five reservoirs that are supplied by this treatment plant,” said Kaunda.
Earlier this week, the South African Human Rights Commission's inquiry on access to water in KZN began.
Don Perumal, the chairperson of the Tongaat Civic Association, said Monday this week was the 126th day that oThongathi residents were without tap water.
He said the failure of the municipality to intervene after the floods was a violation of the law because the moment the president declared a disaster it should have been fixed quickly.
Perumall said residents woke to no water and returned from work to no water. He said the municipality had failed to communicate and work with residents to solve the crisis and use fair methods of allocating water because there were insufficient water tankers.
“We could have possibly had water today had this matter been taken seriously. We believe that the municipality’s failure to implement the Section 26 regulation immediately has affected our human dignity and right to have respect and be protected,” he said.
Charley Chetty, who is also with the association, said the municipality was discriminating in the way it supplied water because some places were attended to faster than others.
In Isipingo last week hundreds of dead fish were found along the Isipingo beach lagoon due to faulty pump stations and bad infrastructure which was allegedly affected by the floods.
The municipality was then forced to issue a warning to the public against collecting and consuming dead fish.
This led the DA in KwaZulu-Natal to call on Water and Sanitation Minister Senzo Mchunu to urgently free up funding for the reconstruction and maintenance of pump stations damaged during the April floods.
The DA also called for the allocation of an equitable water services infrastructure grant to repair and maintain the eThekwini system that has been increasingly neglected over the past two decades.
As a result, the DA is expected to conduct oversight visits to sewage spill hotspots in eThekwini from Wednesday to Thursday.
The visits are expected to begin at Phoenix and Durban North. Followed by Queensburgh and Chatsworth on Thursday.
Following these oversights, the DA will put together proposals to the municipality and nationally about how these could be addressed.
Daily News