Tongaat residents are grappling with a deepening water crisis, prompting community leaders to demand immediate intervention from local authorities.
The Tongaat Task Team (TTT) has approached Mayor Cyril Xaba once again, with a letter of their grievances around the ongoing water and electricity woes.
The TTT was created by Ven-Pac's Ricky Naidoo in a bid to fight the water crisis in a unified approach.
The group attended the meeting at the Mayoral Parlour on Monday with Councillor Yogis Govender following a request from the TTT.
“The letter given to the mayor outlines concerns regarding prolonged power and water outages in Tongaat, which have caused significant distress to vulnerable community members, including the elderly, infirm, and those with chronic health conditions,” said Naidoo.
TTT wanted an update on the status of service restoration efforts in Tongaat, particularly for water and electricity supply with actions taken to address the concerns raised by the them in their previous communications in December and proper coordination and engagement with the ward councillor and relevant stakeholders.
“We went to the meeting arranged by the mayor and he requested reports from his team on the water issues and by today (Friday) he will give us feedback. However he hasn't come back as yet.
“We had a feeling he wouldn't respond to us, as he always does this by not responding through the many letters we have sent him. They are not worried about the issues they face in Tongaat. People are suffering and nothing is being done, they make promises and don’t keep them, so it’s up to us, the TTT, to fight for the community to have water,” said Naidoo.
Venk-Pac has been supplying free water to Tongaat since the 2022 floods.
Councillor Govender, DA eThekwini EXCO Member, said they had filed a notice of motion with the Speaker's office with requests of emergency intervention in the Tongaat water crisis.
“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 were unable to recover. This resulted in many suburbs going days without water, with no notice on what is causing the repeated collapses,” said Naidoo.
Naidoo highlighted that the city needed to act with urgency as people were suffering.
The eThekwini Municipality did not comment at the time of publication.
Related Topics: