A Storm in a Water Pipe: Causes of the Gauteng Water Crisis
Some have described the recent Gauteng water crisis as a ‘perfect storm' in order to explain the severe outages across widespread areas of Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg, Mogale City and Tshwane. This explanation allows those responsible for water provision in the province to distance themselves from the actual causes of the problem and thus dodge responsibility. The fact is, those same people and organisations were responsible for the outages and this they cannot escape.
The first water outage hit southern and western parts of Johannesburg, Krugersdorp and the south-western parts of Tshwane (Centurion, Laudium, Erasmia) after the Rand Water pump station at Eikenhof stopped pumping water due to an electricity outage. This electricity outage was caused by a faulty sub-station, supplying electricity to the pump station, which gave up the ghost. The logical question is ‘but was there no back-up in place?' This is a valid question and on paper there is a back-up substation that should kick in when the primary one fails.
This did not happen because this substation had been out of service since November 2012 and nobody had bothered to fix or replace the faulty equipment. The two substations in question were also of inferior quality and could not be integrated with the grid and operate as stand-alone operations. In short, a lack of foresight and proper maintenance of the infrastructure supplying electricity to a key installation caused the failure of the equipment that led to an unprecedented water outage.
As the system was still recovering from the Eikenhof outage alleged cable theft caused an electricity outage at the Rand Water pump station situated at Palmiet. This pump station supplies water to Ekurhuleni and more specifically Germiston, Tsakane, Brakpan and Boksburg. This is an area that includes major industries.
Due to a lack of communication between Rand Water and its client, the Ekurhuleni municipality, reservoirs were allowed to run dry, something which would impact on the restoration of supply later on.