South Africa’s richest city hit by water crisis

Johannesburg is facing a new water crisis before summer hits, despite extensive maintenance by Rand Water throughout the year. 

This is due to the city, through Johannesburg Water, failing to conduct adequate maintenance of municipal water infrastructure, resulting in significant water losses before it reaches users’ taps. 

Areas of South Africa’s richest city have been hit by sporadic water outages over the winter months due to the collapse of basic infrastructure. 

While the city’s bulk supplier, Rand Water, has conducted maintenance throughout its infrastructure, this work is undone by Johannesburg Water’s mismanagement. 

This is feedback from the executive director of WaterCAN, Dr Ferrial Adam, who outlined the city’s latest water crisis in a recent interview with Newzroom Afrika. 

Adam explained that Rand Water has been conducting extensive maintenance on its bulk water systems, through which it sells water to various municipalities, including the City of Johannesburg. 

This is not the current challenge facing water supply in Johannesburg, with the current water crisis brought about by the mismanagement of the municipal entity, Johannesburg Water. 

“What we are experiencing in Johannesburg is the lack of maintenance done by Johannesburg Water, resulting in systems not functioning properly,” Adam said. 

“What we are seeing is the repetition of a cycle, whereby inadequate maintenance of infrastructure results in increased water losses and shortages.” 

The only way this can be halted is if Johannesburg Water gets an increased budget and uses the additional money to fund the maintenance of existing infrastructure. 

“Without that, we are going to continue seeing these cycles of the city going into winter with a very fragile system that is likely to fail in some areas due to load reduction or load-shedding,” Adam said. 

“When you start going into summer, there will be an increase in demand, and the system quite simply cannot meet that demand.” 

Adam warned that if Johannesburg Water does not increase its expenditure on maintenance, the city will continue to be in the mess it is currently in. 

What is most concerning is that it is no longer isolated areas impacted by water outages, but the entire city. 

Joburg’s water system is unstable

The problems encountered by Johannesburg Water in recent months reflect the vulnerability of the city’s water system. 

Despite lower demand in winter, parts of the city continued to experience water shortages and complete outages. 

While some of this was due to scheduled maintenance from Rand Water, the fact that this resulted in prolonged outages indicates the fragility of the system. 

“There was a little bit of an underestimation of the impact of the maintenance on the downstream supply of water in the city,” Adam said. 

“However, Johannesburg Water was also on the back foot in being unprepared to manage the impact of Rand Water’s planned maintenance, and so it highlighted the weakness and fragility of the Johannesburg water system.” 

Adam explained that this was highlighted by the city’s water system’s inability to recover quickly from the planned maintenance, with it taking days or even weeks to restore supply to some areas. 

“The water system did not recover as it should have. That is why you saw prolonged outages in the East and South of Johannesburg,” Adam said. 

This was exacerbated by the breakdown of two pump stations in different parts of the city, which prevented Johannesburg Water from getting water to some areas or adequately filling reservoirs. 

Adam explained that despite constant warnings about a water crisis in South Africa’s richest city, the level of outages during winter was unexpected. 

“It is consistently bad. We did not expect a change for the good or the worse. You can’t say that maintenance is being done and things are getting better when it is only improving at a particular point in the system,” she said. 

“It does not matter if things are getting better at a Rand Water level when with Johannesburg Water, we are experiencing the same mess we have had for the past few years.”