Since Friday last week people living in certain areas in and around Grahamstown have been struggling without a water, due to a burst water pipe coming from the Howieson's Poort Dam, leaving the Waainek water treatment plant out of working order.
A press release on the Makana Municipality's website, sent out by Municipal Manager Ntombi Baart, identified the industrial area, Waainek Prison, the army base, Cradock Heights,Tantyi, Joza, New Town and Vukani as the areas that will be worst affected by the water outage.
Since Friday last week people living in certain areas in and around Grahamstown have been struggling without a water, due to a burst water pipe coming from the Howieson's Poort Dam, leaving the Waainek water treatment plant out of working order.
A press release on the Makana Municipality's website, sent out by Municipal Manager Ntombi Baart, identified the industrial area, Waainek Prison, the army base, Cradock Heights,Tantyi, Joza, New Town and Vukani as the areas that will be worst affected by the water outage.
Naturally, this inconvenience has left residents frustrated and fuming. One resident from West Hill felt that the municipality wasn't holding up its end of the bargain. "This water outage is really frustrating because you pay your rates at the end of the month, but I'm lucky that I have a water tank."
The same resident further said that the municipality could only tell them what the problem was after they phoned for a second time. They were told that the dam levels were low which had apparently caused the problem, but "if they were doing their job monitoring the dams this wouldn't have been a problem and they could have fixed it before it affected us."
A resident from the Oatlands area, Caroline King, told Grocott's Mail: "As a working person I couldn't do my washing over the past weekend, and I had to go all the way to the other side of town just to shower at a friend's place." She said that her water supply had returned after three days, "but now that it's back it looks funny and murky."
At the time of going to press Municipal Spokesperson, Thandy Matebese, had not confirmed with Grocott's Mail how long it would take to fix the problem and which areas were still affected.
