South Africa seems to be moving from one disaster to the next and all of this can ne laid at the feet of the ANC government who have been in power for 32 years. In the constitution water is listed as a basic right for every citizen and having no water can be legally challenged. Then they should not be able to cut your water supply if you are late paying the bill which they like to do as there are reconnection fees.
First we had load shedding which started way back in 2007 and is a way of conserving power supply through turning power off in set regions of the country. There is a time table that is used and depending on how much power needs to be saved there are levels 1 through to 8. 8 being a total black out across the country and level 6 being reached in December 2019, June 2022 and frequently in 2024. Stage 6 is 4-5 hour periods of no power multiple times per day. A news story a few days ago was celebrating 300 days of no load shedding which is not even close to the truth. Loadshedding is now disguised as maintenance or general power failures and we have them regularly at least 4 or 5 times monthly. My solar inverter history tells me how often the grid is shut down and this is far more than I was aware of.
Water shedding is the exact same thing as the regulated planned power cuts caused by no maintenance over the last 32 years. We are lucky where we live and tend to dodge the no water problems other areas are experiencing.
Rand Water is the SOE (State Owned Enterprise) in Gauteng and their head offices are just down the road so is a probable reason why we are so lucky. The problem however does not lie with the SOE and is more the individual municipalities maintaining the infrastructure or should I say lack of maintenance. In Africa the policy is it does not need fixing if it is not broken and they will wait for it to break first.
Rand Water have been complaining about the municipalities because they are still supplying them water and in most cases far more water as so much is being lost due to leaking pipes. Some areas are receiving 35-40% more than they once were so it tells you the water pipes are leaking more and more water.
Looking at the above table there is not one municipality that is on a fair or good score with every single one on critical or poor. Critical is serious and there are far more in critical condition than poor which is of major concern.
There were cases of corruption which involved water truck tenders that never supplied water to various communities and got paid. There is always someone willing to benefit from someone's misfortune which is despicable behavior, yet expected.
In Johannesburg we are in the rainy season and we always worry how much rain water is being caught and fed back into the system and soon enough will expect hose pipe bans due to low water levels in the catchment dams. A few years ago we had record rain fall and within months were on water restrictions which makes no logical sense besides the failure in infrastructure.
Updates are supplied on social media detailing the various reservoirs or towers and how much water is available. Green seems to be good here and red we all know is bad lol. Throttling is never a great term and does not sound very good either and bypass not sure whether good or bad in this case. Throttling must be some method of stopping the flow of water so I would say closing the valves or flow of water. The truth is I have never had to pay attention to whether our water in the area area was adequate or being throttled so there is a little ignorance on my part.
I see in Soweto some areas are supplying fairly which is a kind of a non positive word when it comes to supply. It is not great it is not good it is fair which is really somewhere between good and poor.
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Some areas have been complaining about lack of water for months at a time and you can see this happening and being more widespread if municipalities do not fix their infrastructure.
At one stage the Department of Water had an excuse with load shedding saying there was no power to pump the water and now we have power there should be no excuses. After being in power for 32 years you cannot exactly blame the previous government even though I can recall this being said with the power crisis back in 2019 which was only 25 years then.
The problem with water is it is not like electricity where you can just add a solar system and solve the problem. One could drill a bore hole with the only problem being with everyone else doing the same thing the one with the longest pipe or deepest hole wins as the water table will be affected. I could have a 70 meter borehole working great and in a years time have no water due to others having dug deeper and I am now left high and dry.