Johannesburg residents were left high and dry for about 24 hours this week, but the city’s water agency says the infrastructure is in “fairly good” shape.
On April 1 pressure from a burst water pipe at the corner of Mooi and Anderson Streets in central Johannesburg caused the road to crack open and sent water gushing into the air. A second burst pipe was reported at the corner of Von Beek and Currie roads in Doornfontein on Monday morning. This left residents of Yeoville, Kensington, Berea and Hillbrow without water for nearly 24 hours.
Jameel Chand, senior communications and marketing manager at Johannesburg Water said: “We do have leaks, but we tend to those leaks responsibly”.
Chand said this had not happened for about 10 years.
“You need just a small defect to occur in a pipe and over a very small period of time it can burst. These things are not guaranteed. Anything that is man-made over a period of time is bound to self-destruct, he said.
Chand said: “We basically look at the frequency of repair work that took place on a pipeline. If it had five bursts in the last three months then that is a problem for us. We look at where the problem areas are, [but] we’re not going to fix something that works. We’re not going to replace a pipe if it’s 25 years old [and it works],” he said.