Entities devise strategies to preserve water in Joburg
Johannesburg residents have experienced increasingly frequent interruptions to their daily water supply, causing hardship for residents and impeding economic growth in the city.
On November 10, Minister of Water and Sanitation Pemmy Majodina convened an urgent meeting to address the water challenges in the City of Johannesburg.
Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi; the deputy ministers of Water and Sanitation, David Mahlobo and Sello Seitlholo; MEC for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs in Gauteng Jacob Mamabolo; the mayor of Johannesburg, Dada Morero, and the leadership of Rand Water attended the meeting.
The meeting reached a unanimous agreement on the causes of the water supply interruptions and what needs to be done to restore a stable water supply to the residents of Johannesburg.
Johannesburg Water, an entity of the city, buys treated water from Rand Water and supplies it to the residents of the CoJ. Rand Water, in turn, buys raw, untreated water from the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS).
Rand Water abstracts raw water from the Integrated Vaal River System (IVRS), which comprises 19 interconnected dams, including major dams like the Vaal Dam, the Sterkfontein Dam and the Katse and Mohale Dams in Lesotho.
Rand Water treats the raw water to meet drinking water quality standards, stores it in bulk reservoirs, and pumps it into the municipality’s reservoirs. From the municipal storage reservoirs, the water either flows under the force of gravity or gets pumped through various distribution pipelines to households and industries across the city.
To ensure a continued reliable supply to users even in a drought, the DWS limits the amount of raw water Rand Water can abstract annually from the IVRS. The limit is currently 1 802m cubic metres of water annually.
Increased demand
The demand for water in Johannesburg has grown and continues to grow because of economic and population growth.
The DWS anticipated this growth in demand and put in place plans to address it as far back as the 1980s through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), which supplies additional water into the IVRS from the Katse and Mohale dams built in the mountains in Lesotho.
The first phase of the LHWP was completed in 2003 and delivers 780m cubic metres of water into the IVRS a year.
Construction of the second phase of the LHWP, for a further 490m cubic metres of water annually into the IVRS from the new Polihali Dam in Lesotho, started in late 2022 and is due to be completed by 2028.
In anticipation of the completion of the second phase, Rand Water is implementing a R35b five-year rolling capital works programme, which includes increasing storage and water treatment capacity. To date, Rand Water has increased the capacity of its Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant by 150m litres per day, costing R3.5b.
Rand Water plans to implement further upgrades of the Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant to increase its capacity by another 450m litres a day by 2028.
The amount of water Rand Water can abstract from the system is not affected by the current closure of the Lesotho Highlands Tunnel for maintenance. The Vaal Dam is currently about 33% full. If and when its level drops to 18%, water will be released from other dams in the system, including the Sterkfontein Dam, to increase the amount of water in the Vaal Dam.
Capacity reached
Rand Water is already abstracting water from the IVRS at the limit set by DWS but cannot abstract more water until the second phase of LHWP starts providing additional water into the IVRS from 2028.
Therefore, Rand Water cannot supply more water to Gauteng municipalities than it currently supplies.
Therefore, the primary underlying cause of the disruptions in Johannesburg is that the peak demand for water is close to, and occasionally exceeds, the available supply from Rand Water.
The demand-supply relationship for treated water in Johannesburg is tight, and the system is vulnerable to electro-mechanical breakdown disturbances or spikes in demand because of heat waves.
In addition to completing the second phase of the LHWP, the meeting agreed that the city must fix the leaks in its water distribution system and complete its current projects to construct more reservoirs and pumping stations to make its water distribution system more resilient to electro-mechanical breakdowns and demand spike.
The 2023 No Drop report issued by the DWS found that water losses in Johannesburg were 35% compared to the international norm of 15%.
Reducing water losses requires a multi-pronged approach by the city, including, among others, improving billing and revenue collection to increase the funds available for maintenance and providing better incentives for efficient water use, improving pressure management, replacing ageing pipes which frequently burst and installing water meters or replacing dysfunctional bulk and customer water meters so that water flows can be accurately measured to determine the location of the losses.
The measures Johannesburg Water will implement include:
• throttling the supply between 21:00 and 04:00 to let reservoir levels recover overnight. The city intends to implement this continuously from November 14 until the system has fully recovered;
• procuring a panel of contractors for emergency repairs of large-diameter pipe water leaks and increasing the number of teams on standby during the week to attend to leaks and burst pipes;
• increasing the number of repair and maintenance teams on duty during the weekend to improve leak repair response times from 48 hours to 24 hours;
• increasing the number of trucks available to its leak repair and maintenance teams;
• cutting off illegal connections in key informal settlements;
• implementing advanced pressure management systems, including installing 45 smart pressure controllers (pressure-reducing valves) over and above the 15 refurbished and retrofitted to date. This will reduce water losses at night when the demand is low, which will substantially reduce water losses;
• accelerating leak detection (to date, 12 100km water pipelines were surveyed and 2 396 burst pipes, 6 727 leaking meters, 442 leaking valves and 259 leaking hydrants identified and repaired.) This intervention resulted in an estimated water demand reduction of 9 457 litres annually;
• working with the National Treasury to form a public-private partnership to reduce non-revenue water and mobilise private-sector funding and expertise for reducing non-revenue water.
Turnaround strategy
The meeting noted and supported the approval by the Johannesburg City Council of a turnaround strategy for Joburg Water.
This strategy includes ring-fencing revenues from the sale of water for the water function and creating single-point accountability for the water function in the city. The intention is to give Joburg Water control over all the functions related to managing the city’s water supply so it can be held accountable.
Even after the second phase of the Lesotho Highlands Project comes onstream, Gauteng’s long-term water consumption will need to be carefully managed because there are limits to which further phases of the LHWP or other water transfer projects can continue to provide additional water to Gauteng at an affordable cost.
Above average use
The 2023 No Drop report found the average water consumption in Gauteng is 279l per person per day. This is 60% above the world average of 173l per person per day, an anomaly given that SA is a water-scarce country with limited sustainable water resources and among the top 30 driest countries globally.
The DWS, Rand Water, the provincial government and all the municipalities in Gauteng are working together to address this with civil society leaders, business leaders and experts to implement a large-scale communications and awareness campaign about the need to use water more sparingly.
The meeting noted that an independent body called the Platform for a Water Secure Gauteng was established to manage this campaign and that, as a first step, a dashboard was created on the DWS website to give the public detailed information on the status of the water supply in Gauteng.
The political leadership in the three spheres of government are confident the measures will be implemented with the necessary urgency. It was agreed that similar meetings would be held every Sunday to monitor progress.
