WATCH: More is done to speedily do the reinstatements in the city

Johannesburg Water (JW) and Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) are working together to mitigate challenges that influence the response time of reinstatement teams.

Such a collaboration was discussed during the media briefing held at JW Southdale Depot on March 8.

Among others, the meeting was attended by JW senior operation manager Logan Munsamy, JRA regional manager Hendrik van Tonder, Ward 54 Clr Stuart Marais and other stakeholders.

JW spokesperson Puleng Mopeli said they had both entities to iron out the confusion on whose responsibility to do reinstatements at what point.

Munsamy explained in detail why it sometimes takes a long time to do the reinstatement.

“Most of the time repairing water pipes underneath takes time depending on the scale of the job. We can dig manually or use TLB to excavate. When the pipe is underneath a tarred road (which belongs to JRA), we expose the pipe and work on it. We will then back-fill it with sand and then get contractors to do the reinstatement.

“We must also agree that not all surfaces are just sand or tarred, some are concrete. So before JRA will do the reinstatements, however, now we take responsibility. We are making progress although there are challenges.

We have three outside service providers (with eight teams per contractor) that we used for medium to large jobs and our in-house contractors for minor or small-scale jobs. Normally each depot has four reinstatement teams. Since last year July to date, our in-house contractors have done 15 200 jobs while the sourced contractors have completed 200. And other jobs are continuing,” explained Munsamy.

He also mentioned that some challenges include slow pace or substandard work from contractors, however, he said they deal with that.

“We are intending to build more capacity as there is a backlog that cannot be eradicated overnight. We also prioritise jobs where we see there’s danger, and again we must bear in mind that old infrastructure takes time to repair,” he said.

Munsamy also noted that their responsibility to do reinstatements is when there was a damaged pipe that they worked on, however, other than that it is JRA’s responsibility.

Van Tonder also explained that theirs is to clean kerb inlets and stormwater, repair potholes and reinstatements among other things. “We encourage the residents to log the calls on the problems using the city’s call centre, Twitter and hotline.

“This is important so that we can trace and monitor the call, and also track the performance.

“We have challenges with kerb inlets because they are deliberately blocked by people in general, sometimes vagrants. Our high-pressure trucks are used to blow out the dirt. The residents will sometimes cut trees’ branches and all that will land in our kerb inlets, also deliberate dumping,” he said.