Amatola Water continues to urge Grahamstown residents to use as much water as possible. "All dams and reservoirs are full and one of the lay dams at the plant is being allowed to overflow as that raw water returns to the Howieson's Poort dam," said Amatola Water's Chris Nair on Thursday 10 April.
Amatola Water continues to urge Grahamstown residents to use as much water as possible. "All dams and reservoirs are full and one of the lay dams at the plant is being allowed to overflow as that raw water returns to the Howieson's Poort dam," said Amatola Water's Chris Nair on Thursday 10 April.
He said no water cuts were anticipated during graduation week, despite technical challenges, however.
The city's residents were astonished last Wednesday when Grocott's Mail Online published Nair's call for residents to do whatever it took to use more water. Residents should fill their swimming pools and water tanks, water their vegetables – whatever it took, he urged.
"From a position where we couldn't supply enough water for everyone, we now have an oversupply," Nair said.
Explaining the reason for the turnaround, Nair said the pump at the Howieson's Poort pump station could not be turned off.
Howieson's Poort feeds directly into the Waainek Water Treatment Works.
The motor from the standby Howieson's Poort pump was being repaired, Nair said. Because they weren't confident they would be able to restart the remaining pump, they opted to keep it running.
By Thursday the situation had not changed.
"Unfortunately the supply of treated water exceeds demand and I'm still not in a position to switch off the Howieson's Poort pump," said Nair.
"We are requesting that consumers keep using as much water as possible."
He said he didn't foresee water supply problems for Graduation Week.
The team had "covered all bases and deployed every contingency plan to ensure interruptions are kept under control".
This included running the machine under load at the factory before bringing it to site.
Quality compliance on the water is also meeting all SANS 241 limits and water quality was not being compromised in any way, he said.
Yesterday, he said, the replacement pump motor was on a 10-ton truck, en route for Grahamstown from Johannesburg, and was expected to arrive in the early hours of Friday morning.
The motor still has to be installed by the commissioning team, which is coming down with the machine, said Nair.
An "isolated outage" which occurred on parts of Rhodes campus on Thursday afternoon was due to a system problem, said Peter Ellis of MBB Consulting.
Shortly after lunch, he said the outage was caused by the replacement of a broken air valve, and water to the areas affected would be reconnected "within two hours".
By 9.30pm taps on the upper parts of the Rhodes University campus remained dry.
