30/03/2023
Water struggles hit Blythedale
HUNDREDS of Blythedale residents were left without water for two full weeks as a result of multiple supply issues which they say were poorly handled by the district municipality.
The outage which began on Saturday, March 11 persisted until this past weekend when the full supply was finally restored in all households and establishments in the area by the iLembe District Municipality.
A resident, who asked not to be named, said the most frustrating thing about going those 14 days without water, was that the reasons for the outage changed on a daily basis.
By Thursday of the some 250 houses affected, only about 30% received low pressure water, but the rest remained dry well until the weekend, she said.
"We were told the TLB they were using broke, then they ran out of spares, then the Umgeni shutdown, then a pipe on a bend that needed special welding then the repair failed, and by then people were gatvol. The water only really came back this past Sunday morning."
She said overall the lack of communication was terribly frustrating because they had to constantly ask for explanations and the call centre was consistently unhelpful or unreachable.
"If they were just honest and said this is what is wrong and this is how long it would be we could have prepared and dealt with that. It's bad enough not having water, but not knowing why or when it was coming back, that is ridiculous."
In an effort to explain the situation, iLembe operations manager for the KwaDukuza area, Elias Bhengu said a 400-dimeter pipe supplying water to the area burst due to surges caused by stopping and starting of the supply by bulk supplier Umgeni Water that was experiencing interruptions, as a result of failures, on its raw water pumps.
“These failures on the raw water supply resulted in Umgeni Lower Thukela pipeline developing more leaks, and also the existing leaks getting worse. This forced Umgeni to stop supply completely in order to deal with those repairs. The initial request for the shutdown was from 6am to 9pm, but this was extended beyond the 9pm to 5am the following morning. The intermittent supply caused surges onto the district municipality’s pipelines which ended up breaking the pipes at a certain point,” said Bhengu.
He said the district made attempts to carry out repairs within a short space of time were not successful resulting in delays on the reinstatement of water supply.
Umgeni conducted repairs on its raw pumps concluding them on the same day as iLembe completed its own repairs on the pipe last Saturday, March 18.
“Unfortunately, the district’s repairs failed and a decision was taken to carry out repairs in parallel with us reinstating the redundant old supply system to Blythedale. We managed to bring the supply to operation on the evening of the 19th,” said Bhengu.
This old system is currently operational and is supplying the Blythedale village, he said.
The shortcomings on the system is that it has not caught up with the demand as a result the high lying areas were still compromised by Thursday.
iLembe is currently supplying Blythedale through the old pipeline whilst repairing the 400-diameter line, he said on Thursday, and repairs on the 400-diameter pipeline were at an advanced stage.
He said they anticipated bringing it on line this past Saturday, which appeared to have been successful.
He said a water tanker had been deployed to the area to supply water daily, and one tanker was enough since there was some supply from the old line and what the truck was doing was to augment especially to areas that did not receive supply.
"iLembe District Municipality is committed to providing continued water supply to its consumers and apologises profusely for the inconvenience that this interruption has caused," Bhengu said.
