Nelson Mandela Bay mayor, Retief Odendaal, said that he has learned over the past few days that many Nelson Mandela Bay residents have absolutely no idea as to how precarious the Bay’s water situation has become.
He referred to a photo that shows him walking towards the intake tower of the Impofu Dam and said the following:
“You will notice there is no water near the intake tower. The municipality had to build barges with portable pumps to be able to extract additional water from this dam. This water is then transferred via a temporary pipe system to the lowest intake at the tower. We currently have only another 0,91 % to extract from this dam.”
Odendaal added that he has had a lot of phone calls from people who were irate because they have experienced water outages from Tuesday.
“Granted, I really understand the frustration – nothing is as debilitating as not having potable water. The fact, however, is that the reason we are currently without water is the fact that we are adding capacity to the system – nearly a third of what we are currently extracting from the nearly depleted Impofu on a daily basis.
“We have now finished the work on the pipeline and we now just need to wait for the system to fill and recover. If you don’t have water yet, chances are good that you will only receive some by tomorrow. Please be patient and understand: there is nothing myself, your ward councillor or our technicians can do to speed up this process,” he emphasised.
He also urged residents to start monitoring their consumption because if a household is using more than 50 litres per person per day, they are part of the problem.
“We all need to adapt our water consumption lifestyle or all collectively suffer the consequences. Lastly, the areas that have been without water these last couple of days won’t be able to receive Nooitgedacht (Gariep) water until next year October. If the Churchill and Impofu are depleted, these areas will basically run out of water.”
