For the past few weeks the Bo Die Rand area has been experiencing daily interruptions in water supply, for hours on end.

We have now reached a point where there is often no water available at nighttime as well.

The water pressure is so low that even if there is a trickle from the cold tap, no hot water can flow from the geyser.

In short, we cannot cook, wash our bodies or our clothing, or flush toilets. I, for one, am not in the position to book into a hotel for the purpose of ablutions.

Meanwhile, new high-density housing developments spring up like mushrooms, even in the relative centre of town, placing infrastructure under ever more pressure, and negatively impacting the quality of life of existing inhabitants.

This municipality should please get its house in order, and provide all its ratepayers with decent services, before blindly expanding the town. It is not sustainable.

Heather Steel,

Stellenbosch

Stuart Grobbelaar, spokesperson for Stellenbosch Municipality, responds:

The municipality would like to apologise for the pipe network outages in the Bo Die Rand area.

Some pipe repairs are due to the pressure differences in the system when surrounding repairs are conducted, which cause the pressure release valves to be manually operated by the operators.

Sometimes, a pipe network needs to be “bled” after the repair to ensure that the air pockets are removed from the system.

The resident is encouraged to send us the instances of the outages quoted, or report it on any of the municipality’s Lets Fix It channels.

The municipality currently has a pipe repair consultant and panel of contractors working on the upgrade of certain sections and junctions of pipes based on our scientific analyses of the pipe network.

Furthermore, and most importantly, the recent water interruption and low water pressure experienced in the Bo Die Rand area was caused by a burst pipe within the said network.

The issue has since been attended to and repaired.

Our technical teams have confirmed that water pressure within the system has returned to normal operating levels.