Water woes stretch to Scottburgh
Freeland Park and Malangeni have recently been beset by supply problems.
LACK of water and intermittent supply have plagued the entire South Coast for the past several weeks, with the worst affected areas being waterless for more than a month.
Parts of Freeland Park had no water last week after a pump station was vandalised.
The station’s panel doors were opened, motor foot mountings were broken and the motor cables stolen, resulting in supply being cut.
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Ugu District Municipality’s monitoring and evaluation team conducted an assessment and sourced spares, ensuring the supply was restored.
“This is not the first time we’ve had to deal with our water being cut like this,” said one Freeland Park resident.
“This has been going on for a very long time and we want to know why the municipality doesn’t communicate with us and let us know why these outages are happening and what they’re doing about it.”
A statement posted to Facebook by the municipality about the vandalised pump station attracted the attention of the Malangeni community, just outside Umzinto.
Their community has had no water for the past two months, said residents.
They added that they were upset that they had not received any updates about the problem over the past weeks and wanted to know if supply would ever be restored as they were battling without it.
Children at schools in Malangeni have no drinking water and cannot flush toilets, posing a major health concern.
“Clearly the municipality and our councillors are not worried about us because they’re not giving us any feedback at all,” said one resident.
“They build us RDP houses with indoor toilets that we can’t even flush because we have no water to do so.”
Some felt that perhaps they had no water as they did not pay rates.
This was countered by ratepayers who were quick to point out that they too suffered frequent loss of supply.
People are growing tired of the endless problems, and are demanding action.
On the lower South Coast, an angry group last week marched to the Ugu District Municipality offices in Port Shepstone to hand over a memorandum of grievances to the mayor, Sizwe Ngcobo.
Now Umdoni residents are considering following suit, with plans for a peaceful protest being mooted.
The municipality was contacted for comment on the Malangeni water supply issue but had not responded at the time of going to press.
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