Perth Road pipe bursts anger residents
Westville residents have said there have been about 15 water pipe burst in the area over a two-week period.
A WESTVILLE family has called on the eThekwini Municipality to do a full repair of the water pipes along Perth Road after continuous bursts have created water outages in the area every few days since the beginning of October.
According to local resident, Prof. Manoj Maharaj, the problems started on Thursday, 1 October, with another burst and water outage two days later.
It took the Water Department two days, 16 to 17 October, to repair another burst along Perth Road.
The Maharaj family, along with their neighours, have numerous reference numbers for fault reports since the beginning of October as well as emails to municipal officials complaining about the water pipe bursts in the area.
To date, only small fixes have been made along Perth Road.
There was a pipe burst outside there home on Monday, 19 October and Maharaj said that the water flowed for about 18 hours before it was repaired.
In an attempt to divert the water from gushing through their home, the family placed rocks over the area of the leak.
ALSO READ: Motala Heights community unites to tackle illegal businesses
“The call centre does their job and they are efficient. The problem is there is no individual you can hold responsible. They send in plumbers to do the jobs and they end up using their cellphones as torches. I was then told by the one contractor they are only allowed to use the spares that Metro provides and they are ‘sub-par’. It can’t be logical that there are between 14/15 breaks in the same line within two weeks and there is no fix. As residents, what do we do? Do we go to court and who do we sue?” said Maharaj.
Once the fault was repaired outside their home and the water was turned back on, Maharaj said it was not regulated and it blew his solar geyser.
He noted that his next door neighbor’s geyser also blew.
“When they were notified of our fault, why did they not come straight away to turn off the water? I can estimate that there was a wastage of at least 20 litres of water per second for a period of about 18 hours. It’s just unacceptable,” said the homeowner.
The eThekwini Municipality did not comment by the time of publication.
Caxton Local Media Covid-19 reporting
