The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality has commended the expansion of the installation of water tanks and pumps project by Santam in NMB, now benefiting old age homes.
This comes after the metro reported in October, that through key stakeholder collaborations Santam donated 18 five thousand-litre water tanks, which were placed and connected at the city’s nine fire stations.
In addition to the water tanks, a donation of 180 twenty five-litre foam concentrate was delivered to be used to augment the water-saving initiatives by using less water in fire incidents.
During a site visit this week, NMBM and Santam visited the fire stations and old age homes to oversee the impact of the project, especially following the significant rainfall in NMB.
“We are encouraged by the gesture from our stakeholders; our nine fire stations no longer use municipal water. They rely on rainwater harvesting to fully service the stations which operate 24 hours a day,” said Infrastructure and Engineering MMC, Councillor Khanya Ngqisha.
“In addition to that, we are happy that the project has expanded and has been completed in some NMB old age homes, to take more pressure away from our water reticulation system. We have received significant rainfall in our city and those tanks did not run dry, which means these facilities continue to use very little municipal water.
“We wish to thank Santam, and to call on other businesses to join us as we continue to push and avoid Day Zero. We are far from the end of the drought crisis. We are grateful for the recent rainfall, and we plead with our residents to continue to save water as the SA Weather Service has predicted that we will continue to receive above average rainfall between now and September, and we certainly hope this is correct. This means we should all be harvesting rainwater with anything from bottles to water tanks.”
“We were concerned when the drought was persisting in the region and there was a possibility of Day Zero, and we felt it would affect communities negatively and undermine the city’s ability to provide fire protection to assets and communities,” said Santam stakeholder programmes manager, Dr Moses Khangale.
“We have done 14 old age homes in the area, working closely with NMBM and provincial disaster management and they identified the old age homes in the ‘red zones’ in terms of water scarcity.
“We know the facilities house the people who are vulnerable to fires, because of their limited mobility and we felt that should fires occur in those spaces the chances of losing life are very high. We wanted to equip them with capabilities but the tanks assist in operating the facilities too.”
