City of Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink blames Rand Water for water interruptions and outages in most parts of the city including at the Olievenhoutbosch and Lotus Gardens clinics.
The municipality has been experiencing water outages in most parts of the city with services interrupted at clinics in Olievenhoutbosch and Lotus Gardens.
Brink has requested Rand Water to supply information of its water level on the system and raised concerns that the water cuts are recurring on a monthly basis.
“After a week of Rand Water outages in the City of Tshwane things are slowly starting to recover and I want to use this opportunity when we do have water to raise a very important issue about Rand Water.
“The City of Tshwane is dependent on Rand Water for upwards of 70% of our water supply. But since December last year almost every month we have had this recurring event of water pressure being shut down to the City of Tshwane. I know we are not the only City affected but I am the mayor of Tshwane. I have to address it for the purpose of our residents.
“We have had this recurring problem every month with either no notice or short notice. We have had meetings with Rand Water. They have talked about load shedding obviously we haven’t had loadshedding in the past few weeks.
“They have spoken about cable theft and vandalism which we understand. But the indications are there is something very wrong at Rand Water and we base this on the fact that when we try to ask for information in particular for Rand Water to share their live telemetry in other words their water levels and for them to notify us in advance of maintenance issues, they just ignored,” said Brink.
Brink reiterated that despite the metro being in arrears with its Rand Water account the water cuts are not credit actions
“So that tells us there is something very wrong at Rand Water. I have written to the chairperson of the board. I have copied the Minister of Water but I do want Tshwane residents to know about the issue because it is going to become a recurring issue in the future.
“The final thing I want to mention is the fact that the City of Tshwane does have an arrear bill with Rand Water. But I do want to be very clear that what is happening now and what is happening since December isn’t credit action.
“It can’t be credit action. Credit action can only happen on notice. We are also in continuous talks with Rand Water about our bill and settling it. The problems we face now are operational issues at Rand Water,” said Brink.
