The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality recently embarked on a massive smart water meter replacement programme to improve billing accuracy and acquire reliable data. Today Mayoral Committee Member for Infrastructure and Engineering, Councillor Khanya Ngqisha, led a team of workers at different sites within the Molly Blackburn cluster where the work has started.
He said that once work has been completed the accurate readings will be used to caution high water consumers.
Ngqisha said,
The current water meters have reached their eight-year life span, which has led to some of them experiencing problems like water leaks and technical challenges which compromised efficiency.
This meter replacement programme will target residents, industries, institutions, and residential flats, including ATTP beneficiaries. The replacement will also do away with estimated data collection that was done due to the inaccessibility of some households or businesses.
It will assist the metro in having a much more reliable and accurate data collection that can be used to monitor consumption for better planning and implementation of water saving strategies. The metro will work closely with ward councillors as a direct link for verification of deployed technicians to specific wards and households, to mitigate against opportunistic criminal elements.
Residents are urged to give municipal workers access to their premises for the replacement of the meters. Local ward councillors will be given a list of properties to be visited, and residents are asked to contact their ward councillor should there be a safety concern.
A list of target areas will be shared on all Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality platforms and via the Ward Councillor offices.
