Pta resident suffers week-long drain blockage with yard floating in faeces, metro blames backlogs on heavy rains
The resident from the east of Pretoria shares the ordeal of spending five days with a leaking drain without any effective assistance from the municipality.
A Pretoria resident spent five days with sewage and faeces floating in her yard due to a blocked drain without any help from the Tshwane municipality.
Wingate Park resident Rensche de Villiers reported a blocked drain on October 22 to the metro and her councillor but had to hire a private plumbing company after five days because metro officials did not show up.
De Villiers said the drain in front of their home’s patio area was spilling all sorts of sewage, even faeces.
“The smell was awful and we couldn’t even open any doors or windows,” she said.
“The warm summer temperatures during the days and evenings also made the bad smell attract a lot of flies.
“Three to four times a day we had to use a hosepipe to spray the sewage out to the front-street yard. This all started running to our neighbour’s driveway.”
The family had to buy steel fencing to close the drain area to prevent their dogs from getting to the sewer, she said.
De Villiers, who has lived in the east of Pretoria for seven years, said her experience made her lose hope in the municipality.
“How do they expect people to live like this? We all pay for services, but they do nothing.
“When we moved in, my neighbour told me that this happens about three times a year and the last time it almost took two weeks for the metro to assist.”
The mother of two said one of her children could not sleep in his room that was closest to the drain, saying, “you wanted to vomit if you walked in there”.
Luckily none of the family members got severely sick, but they did suffer stomach cramps and vomiting which lasted only for a day.
“On Sunday morning, it was horrible and there was no response from the metro. I then phoned our insurance company to send somebody out, but they could not open it as it was blocked too badly by the street pipes,” she said.
“Tuesday evening was the worst. It then just started running and didn’t stop. I phoned again with no assistance from the municipality.
“On Wednesday, we got a company to assist. They at least managed to open it up a little bit which helped.”
A metro official finally showed up – seven days after she reported the blockage.
“He apologised for not being on time,” De Villiers said.
“He said he was only given the case on October 28. He said he was coming from ward 3, and we fall under ward 6. He said they had a truck but no staff.”
She said the metro official opened the main drain in the street and started cleaning and removing tree roots and all sorts of dirt.
The De Villiers’ are not the only family affected by blocked drains not being fixed on time.
Tshwane metro spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said the municipality had a backlog in fixing blocked drains.
“We are receiving a high volume of sewer blockages due to the current rain season and that causes delays in service delivery,” he said.
He said to address this problem the municipality has a system in place in which “regions without backlogs are assisting those with backlogs”.
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