Pretoria - Residents affected by massive water outage in Pretoria east, have been reassured that the metro was prioritising the restoration of water after supply interruption from Rand Water for at least four days.
MMC for utilities and regional operations, Themba Fosi, said water had been flowing to the municipality's reservoirs since Sunday, albeit rather slow during the day owing to high usage.
The loss of water was due to repairs carried out to fix a leak on the utility’s B8 pipeline between the Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant and the Mapleton Booster Pumping Station that occurred on April 12.
Fosi said the water utility had a flooding incident at their Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant.
“This was followed by power interruptions from Eskom to Rand Water’s Mapleton Booster Pumping Station on Friday, April 14 2023, which lasted until Sunday, April 16 2023, when electricity was restored in the early morning hours,” he said.
He said Zuikerbosch and Mapleton provided the water supply to a large part of Pretoria East and other parts of Tshwane.
“The extended difficulties that lasted across four days meant that City of Tshwane and Rand Water reservoirs ran low or empty.
“As we are aware by now, having experienced similar challenges with the Rand Water supply, largely due to problems with Eskom’s electricity provision, such outages mean that our City of Tshwane network takes an extended time to restore water provision to all customers, especially those in high-lying areas,” Fosi said.
He said the City has been engaging Rand Water continuously since Friday, pushing to ensure as speedy a restoration of service as possible.
“However, as per Rand Water’s own media statement on Sunday, the system will require a recovery period of up to one week to fully stabilise.
“Water has been flowing to our City of Tshwane reservoirs since Sunday, but with high water usage during the day our reservoirs normally only make significant recovery overnight.
“We have seen water supply return to low-lying areas and are working to restore sufficient supply in our reservoirs to get supply to high-lying areas.”
The city was currently throttling Garsfontein reservoir to build capacity and push water through the greater part of its network.
“Garsfontein reservoir is being monitored closely and more water will be released as reservoir levels improve. We are expecting reservoir levels to improve throughout the day and overnight, and we will continue monitoring the situation.
“In the interim, we have deployed water tankers to the affected areas,” he said.
Pretoria News