It was a perfect storm: a heatwave, neglected and decayed water provision systems and electricity failures at Rand Water. That combination caused a severe water shortage in parts of Joburg this month.
The crisis hit many high-lying areas, leaving thousands of residents without water for days, even weeks — and leaving city and provincial politicians scrambling for solutions.
President Cyril Ramaphosa stepped in, with water as a central element in his state of the nation address last Thursday. He directed water & sanitation minister Pemmy Majodina and minister of co-operative governance Velenkosini Hlabisa to skip the opening of parliament and provide ground support to Gauteng’s leadership corps.
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi rubbed salt into the wound by declaring that he, too, suffers when the water dries up — and that he must resort to “showering at a hotel”. Even by his standards, it was an insensitive comment that has infuriated residents standing in queues for water from tankers that might not arrive.
So what was behind this outage?
The FM has written extensively about the history of the Gauteng water crisis.
Gauteng in general and Joburg in particular have long been vulnerable to water shortages. The distribution infrastructure has been neglected for decades, due to management failures and underfunding by the city itself. There were also delays to the second phase of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (due to potentially corrupt intentions).
At the end of January, a string of electromechanical faults at Rand Water triggered failures down the chain, many of which could have been avoided if Joburg Water was well run.
Water & sanitation director-general Sean Phillips tells the FM: “If you are pumping water, you should have a spare pump in case the first pump has problems. Rand Water does maintain its systems well, but in any large-scale industrial system like Rand Water’s, you do occasionally get unforeseen breakdowns.
“In this case, one of the pumps malfunctioned, which caused a transformer to blow up, which in turn caused an incoming Eskom electricity supply line to burn up, and then there was another electromechanical fault, and then a large leak suddenly happened in one of the reservoirs. These things collectively happened over about four or five days at the end of January. Rand Water fixed all of them quickly.”
What we are going through in all 11 municipalities of Gauteng is self-inflicted pain, where they were unable to do the necessary things
— Pemmy Majodina
But in that time Rand Water had to curb supply to the municipalities. As the downstream impact began to be felt, a heatwave struck. Residents who did have water were topping up their pools and watering gardens. Rand Water’s supply returned after a few days to its normal volume of about 5,000Ml per day. But the impact on municipal distribution lasted much longer.
Says Phillips: “This was happening over and above a very vulnerable, fragile system. The municipalities for a long time haven’t invested sufficiently in their own reservoir and pumping capacity. Joburg Water has projects under way to build additional reservoir capacity, to fix its leaking reservoirs, and to build additional pumping capacity so that it doesn’t have to just rely on gravity to push the water to high-lying areas.
“But it’s only been starting to do this stuff over the past year or two and it hasn’t gone far enough. It still doesn’t have enough reservoir and pumping capacity. When you had that big drop in supply for four or five days from Rand Water, all the reservoirs went really, really low, but demand continued, and then we got the heatwave.”
The heat lasted about 10 days, driving up consumption — already higher than it should be.
The city is still underresourcing Joburg Water; it continues to resist ring-fencing revenue from water to maintain infrastructure. At one stage money intended for water maintenance was diverted to pay salaries.
Leaks in the system account for 35% of the total volume of water distributed. “It’s not only the infrastructure,” says Phillips, “it’s also the city’s capacity to fix the leaks, its responsiveness and its resources. If the leaks alone could be fixed, it would take us out of this difficult situation.” Gauteng’s average consumption of water per capita per day is 265l, far above the Western Cape at about 160l and the international average of 173l.
This problem is not new. Both Rand Water and Majodina expressed frustration in parliament before the portfolio committee last year at the city’s failure to simply do the basics right. “What we are going through in all 11 municipalities of Gauteng is self-inflicted pain, where they are unable to do the necessary things — that is, to operate their reservoirs and water resources, as well as maintenance,” Majodina said.
The good news is that the combination of factors that caused the massive outage is unlikely to arise frequently. The bad news is that the system remains at risk of failure because of what should be manageable day-to-day problems. At the heart of it is the chronic failure of the city to simply do its job.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
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