Eskom crisis has exposed SA’s municipal crisis

Rolling blackouts continue to cripple South Africa’s water processing and distribution networks. A number of municipalities are warning how water supply is being affected by increased load-shedding.

Water and energy are intertwined, explained Anja Du Plessis, an associate professor and research specialist in integrated water resource management at Unisa.  

“In a water system, you require energy to pump the water from the source — any water body — and then this water needs to be pumped to your water treatment works, which we know is not always functioning optimally. These water treatment works are dependent on electricity, so water cannot be treated or be put into the system if there’s no suitable back-up power,” she said.

All water infrastructure is designed on certain assumptions, said Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of Free State. “One of those assumptions is the steady state operation of a given system between upper and lower limits. The other assumption is the availability of electricity.”

Both of these assumptions are “invalid” under conditions of persistent load-shedding. “So, in effect, the design of all water systems is flawed as a result of load-shedding. The persistence of load-shedding means that both water and sewage systems are unable to operate as designed, and have therefore failed.

“We cannot speak of ‘going to fail’, because they have already failed. All that now matters is the consequence of those failures, because they are cumulative and we simply don’t know what the combined impact will be over time,” Turton said.

The Eskom crisis has exposed the country’s municipal crisis. “It’s an exacerbating factor that accelerates the collapse of municipal systems, which have been under great strain for decades. The lack of competent elected leadership in municipalities is another exacerbating factor.”

Citing the case of Johannesburg, it has a “mayor with no core skills and a limited constituency, yet he is a tool for forces intent on milking the coffers dry”, he said. 

“Our major metros are in distress, but I was recently in George, which stands out as a beacon of hope because it is very well managed and operated. It shows that excellence is possible where there is adequate political will and public support.”

Water treatment plants, said Du Plessis, should be exempted from blackouts to “ensure that we have drinking water of a suitable standard”.

Prolonged power outages can cause sewage overflows if there are no working back-up pumps in place, she said, warning how the sewage crisis is “being fast-forwarded”.

“In terms of our sewage treatment plants, they’re already mostly dysfunctional  … and then you have the issue, firstly, of them not being exonerated from load-shedding and, secondly, of the back-up pumps, which might be in place if there are any, which have also not been maintained or looked after.”

Many of the country’s polluted river systems no longer have “buffering capacity” to dilute the concentrations of pollutants flowing into them. 

“The buffering capacity is low to non-existent in some places, which will lead to more water quality problems. We will see a sharp increase in pollution and that will increase the costs of water treatment.”  

She added these sewage spills pose significant risks to human health “and obviously you have an impact on the environment itself”.

According to Rembu Magoba, the manager of the Water Research Centre at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, “there are no words to express how devastating the problems [are] that load-shedding is causing” to the country’s ailing wastewater treatment works.

“However, we will just be hiding behind load-shedding if we blame all our problems of wastewater management and treatment on that as the issue of poor maintenance in the sector is well documented. It is a combined effect of poor management of infrastructure and load-shedding, which makes it worse,” he said.

Speaking to Newzroom Afrika this week, Minister of Water and Sanitation Senzo Mchunu said that “there’s a lot of havoc caused by load-shedding” to water and sanitation services in the country.

“It’s all over. We are dealing with the Eastern Cape, specifically in Gqeberha and East London. We were dealing with Gauteng and some of the issues are not over, just a little bit of improvement here and there. We are from the North West today … and there is a problem of load-shedding.”

The department’s director general, Sean Phillips, had been tasked with putting together a team to come up with proposals and suggestions for “how do we, with relative ease in terms of expense, find a way of keeping water running through taps, regardless of load-shedding,” he said.

“One of the things that has been considered and been implemented, in some cases by individual municipalities, is to ask Eskom to exempt particular pump stations and water treatment plants to allow them to fill their reservoirs so they can assist people with the provision of water.” 

“There’s no problem in terms of availability of water in the sources … but processing water and pumping, cleaning, that’s where we’re experiencing problems, and we’re looking at how we can ease the problem that is faced by residents,” he said.

In recent weeks, residents in parts of Johannesburg were affected by a power failure at Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station. In Ekurhuleni and in Tshwane, load-shedding caused taps to run dry. On Tuesday, several areas in the three metros were experiencing water cuts because of a power failure at Rand Water’s Palmiet pump station.

“You have one power outage for one pump scheme [Eikenhof] and the water is off and reservoirs can’t recharge after load-shedding,” said Du Plessis. “If we are on our way to an El Niño, it’s very concerning especially in the state we are now. El Niño is associated with below-average rainfall, more heatwaves, above-average temperatures. We’re going to sit with even worse water shortages.”

While Rand Water said it is completing its generator installation project, Du Plessis said this was not a sustainable intervention. 

Rand Water noted that generator capacity will not cover all its sites and that “power outages remain one of the biggest threats to the stability of Rand Water’s networks as it affects continuous water supply to municipalities”.

Spokesperson Makenosi Maroo said: “We know that load-shedding is here for some time, we are coming with a temporary measure — the generator project. Our plants are power intensive … We have an agreement with power suppliers.”

Water expert Ayesha Laher said to help stem the effects of load-shedding on water supply in Gauteng, “we can put in a back-up generator, which costs a lot of money to pump the water during load-shedding. Alternatively they can exempt those areas from load-shedding so we’ll have more water coming in. 

“In the city of Lilongwe in Malawi, they’ve got one big water treatment plant and some command reservoirs. 

“The four command reservoirs that there are are exempted from load-shedding [as is] the water treatment plant. With the two smaller ones they put in solar panels so they could run those small pumps. And they did it in six months,” Laher said. 

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