Terenure residents without water after a water pipe burst
A burst pipe in Terenure left residents without water for days. After the pipe was fixed, the area was not resurfaced and a hole was left open with no tape around it.
Burst water pipes have become a common occurrence in Kempton Park.
In most cases, the affected residents are left without water for days.
Frustrated residents left without water contacted the Kempton Express to bemoan the CoE’s Customer Call Centre.
Some residents claimed they were kept on hold when they called, which eventually ended with them hanging up.
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Others said they had to use their own resources to resolve their water supply problems.
The residents on Stegman Street, Terenure, recently faced a similar problem after a water pipe burst.
According to a resident in the area, it took municipal workers several days to show up and fix the pipe.
During this time, fresh potable water continuously flowed down the street.
Since the issue was reported to the Kempton Express, the repairs were done, but the area around them was not rehabilitated.
The pipe in question burst on the driveway of an assisted living facility for the elderly.
“The hole is about 1.5m in diameter and about 1.2m deep.
“It’s right by the entrance of the boom gates, and a lot of young children pass there to and from school,” said a resident.
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She said she had taken tape and marked the area to alert motorists and pedestrians.
Spokesperson for the city, Zweli Dlamini, said pipe repair projects were handed to two different departments.
“Water will fix the leak and then send a request to roads to fix the road,” he said.
“The turnaround to such requests is determined by the amount of work the roads department has to attend to first before each request,” he said.
Dlamini further said it was a norm that tape be put at the hole to warn the public about the situation, but in some instances, people ripped it off.
“The matter has been resent to the roads department, and is receiving attention,” he said.
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“Residents get reference numbers when they report issues, and these are attended to.
“It may be an issue of a slow turnaround time, and we are attending to this through the introduction of better mechanisms of managing calls and dispatching them to departments to attend and close,” said Dlamini.
He added that every week, heads of operations and customer relations managers met to assess performance and intervene when an intervention was needed.
“The call centre and My COE app remain our key tools for reporting service delivery matters,” he said.
