The water crisis in Grahamstown is far from over. Some high-lying areas of town and certain townships either have no water at all or they receive the precious liquid only intermittently.
The water crisis in Grahamstown is far from over. Some high-lying areas of town and certain townships either have no water at all or they receive the precious liquid only intermittently.
More fortunate residents in other parts of town and the university campus appear to be partially placated as their water service has been restored. This is not necessarily a sign of progress – it might be just a temporary reprieve.
Those who believe we could be seeing the last of the persistent water cuts are sadly mistaken, and in the near future they could find themselves trying to squeeze the last few drops out of their green water tanks.
Last week’s successful installation of a refurbished pump at the Howieson’s Poort pump station was a step in the right direction, but almost as soon as it got going, one of the main pumps at the James Kleynhans Water Treatment works seized.
It will now require major repairs to get it going again. We have been trying to get to the root of the water problems in the Makana municipal area so that we can explain to our readers why there are major water outages almost every week.
This is an exceedingly difficult challenge because the municipality does not want residents to know how they are messing up. They consciously hide useful information from residents.
We routinely phone and email municipal officials to find out how they are going to resolve this major crisis. They almost never answer emails and only rarely answer their top-of-the-range smartphones that you, dear reader, are paying for.
On the rare occasion that a query is answered it is usually with a brief, vague explanation aimed at brushing us off as easily as possible.
Last week we went to Howieson’s Poort dam in a desperate attempt to find out what was happening there. It was clear that the dam was almost empty, but the local officials would not let us into the pump house to see it. Makana Municipality’s senior official in charge of the water reticulation system was angry with Grocott’s Mail for daring to try to find out whether they had actually installed the refurbished pump or not.
We were sceptical because we had been fed false information about this pump earlier in the week.
This week we decided to visit the James Kleynhans Water Treatment works next to the Glen Melville dam because we heard that one of its pumps had seized. For the record, we did not sneak in, nor did we enter under false pretences.
We arrived and immediately told the security official who we were and why we were there. We found out that the pump had indeed seized and it was most probably due to the fact that all three pumps at the treatment works are over extended. They pump for too many hours at a time and are not given proper maintenance.
The logical consequence is that they break down often. The result of our excursion to the dam was that the water services director was absolutely livid, making all kinds of absurd and unfounded allegations. Who knows what they are hiding? We do.
