The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s water quality crisis has been resolved, the NMBM announced today, February 25.
This follows reports
earlier this week of a deterioration in the quality of the metro’s drinking water. The reports indicated that
certain microbiological limits had been exceeded. This resulted in the municipality issuing a warning to residents that municipal water from their taps
was not safe to drink.
Residents were advised to use precautionary measures, like boiling and
disinfecting water, before drinking. Over the past four days, the municipality has been working around the clock to troubleshoot the
whole water reticulation system. Part of the remedial action taken was to embark on the intensive,
rigorous sampling and testing of samples from all the municipality’s treatment, reservoir and
distribution infrastructure to identify possible areas of contamination.
On Tuesday, the Municipal Water Services team, working with the Environmental Health
Directorate, narrowed down the contamination to the Grassridge Treatment Works. The Grassridge
Treatment Works is a reservoir that was temporarily converted into a treatment facility to assist the
water generating capacity of the metro through the Nooitgedacht water distribution system.
Following the identification of the Grassridge Treatment facility as the cause of contamination, the municipality took a decision to immediately cut off water from the Grassridge facility. Subsequent to
the closure of the Grassridge Treatment Works facility, the municipality embarked on urgent
mitigation measures.
Part of the mitigation measures was to increase the dosage of chlorine at all reservoirs that
experienced microbiological failures, followed by a rigorous sampling and testing exercise to
determine if there were any improvements in the system. All the samples that have been taken and
tested since yesterday have confirmed that there are no longer any traces of contamination in the metro’s water system.
“The mitigation measures that we have embarked on in the past four days have yielded positive results,” said Joseph Tsatsire, Director in the municipality’s Water and Sanitation Department.
The temporary decommissioning of the Grassridge Treatment Works has led to a deficit in the municipality water supply, as the Treatment Works was pumping in about 50ML per day.
Currently,
the metro’s water consumption is way too high. Under the current water restrictions, the metro is
supposed to use 250ML per day and yet it consumes about 275ML per day. The deficit of
Grassridge has further aggravated the situation. A number of areas in the Western Suburbs are
already experiencing intermittent water supply.
“We urge our residents to drastically decrease their water usage so that we can make sure that we
avoid dry taps. Dry taps do not only affect general hygiene, they also negatively affect our
infrastructure, which leads to a risk to our water safety,” Tsatsire added.
He cautioned residents to continue boiling or disinfecting water for a day or two before
drinking straight from the taps.
“In as much as our water is clear of a health hazard, we plead with residents to be patient with us for
a window period of a day or two, by continuing to boil and disinfect their tap water. We expect
things to be back to normal by Sunday already. The drought that we are currently experiencing is
testing our facilities and the low dam levels continue to compromise the quality of raw water.”
The municipality has also acquired services of the Nelson Mandela University to do an in-depth
investigation and audit of the municipality’s water distribution and storage system to check whether
they are up to the expected standards.
The investigation will also include the recent contamination, possible causes and remedies to avoid
such incidents happening in future.
