Johannesburg Water says it has a two-phase plan to repair 44 leaking reservoirs in the city, about half of its total amount of reservoirs. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Johannesburg Water says it has a two-phase plan to repair 44 leaking reservoirs in the city, about half of its total amount of reservoirs.
Phase one entails repairing 23 reservoirs, which commences in July, while phase two entails a total of 21 reservoirs, starting in mid-2026. There are 87 reservoirs in the city.
“It is a turnkey project that, in most cases, takes up to 12 months to complete the repairs,” said Nombuso Shabalala, the spokesperson for the utility. “By repairing such reservoirs, it not only extends the service life but significantly reduces physical losses.”
Johannesburg Water was responding to the Mail & Guardian’s recent enquiries on widespread water outages across the city.
According to Shabalala, these water shortages are mostly because of high demand on some systems in Johannesburg Water’s network but the impact “results in overall system input volumes exceeding the allowable limits”.
She said that short-term interventions include daily throttling and closures on high-demand systems. “However, our medium to long-term solution is aligned to our water conservation and water demand management strategy programmes.”
On the water cut-offs in the east of Johannesburg, Shabalala said: “To ensure equitable distribution of water to systems experiencing challenges, throttling, closure and shifting of water between systems occurs. During prolonged no water conditions, water tanking may be provided and residents are informed accordingly.”
Throttling occurs throughout all regions of Joburg according to a schedule, which is communicated to residents daily and targeted at high-consumption areas. The benefit of throttling is that it allows reservoirs within that system to recover faster so that equitable water distribution occurs, she added.
“The disadvantage is that airlocks occur in the pipelines which lead to increased leaks and bursts on systems that have aged steel or asbestos cement pipework. Hence, sizable investment is being made into pressure management and smart controller devices to manage our systems more efficiently without increasing leakages and minimum night flow losses.”