Gauteng water supply on a knife edge
22 September 2014
The week-long water outages in large parts of southern, eastern and western Gauteng during the past week was the result of poor contingency planning and maintenance, lack of technical competence and was exacerbated by disastrous communication.
It has furthermore shown Gauteng's inability to respond properly to emergencies relating to water outages and its vulnerability as a province when suffering electricity outages.
Electricity supply to Rand Water's major pumping station at Eikenhof, south of Johannesburg was interrupted causing many of the smaller reservoirs in municipalities fed by it, to run dry.
As a result water supply was sporadic and at times non-existent leaving millions of people without this precious resource.