WATER supply was finally restored in Seaview on January 24 following a major burst pipe on South Coast Road near Bayhead that left many households without water for almost four days.

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While the municipality provided temporary water relief measures, including water tankers, residents described these efforts as insufficient and unreliable, with many saying the tankers did not arrive regularly.

Ward 64 councillor Norman Gilbert said: “While infrastructure failures do occur, what is deeply concerning in this case is the extent to which delays, poor co-ordination, and apparent system failures significantly prolonged the outage.”

Gilbert said after the initial burst, water was shut off and a repair team was dispatched. However, despite teams being present on site, work was repeatedly delayed or halted due to the unavailability of officials required to open or close valves.

He explained that on two separate occasions, completed repairs could not be tested or commissioned for several hours simply because no authorised official was available to operate the valves.

“We lost close to 20 hours not because repairs could not be done, but because teams were waiting for someone to arrive and open or close valves. That is not an acceptable situation when an entire community has no water.”

In addition, Gilbert said there were two extended periods, each close to 12 hours, where no repair work took place at all. These delays materially contributed to residents being without water for nearly four days.

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“A further complication arose when a repaired section failed after the valves were opened too rapidly, causing excessive pressure in the line and resulting in the pipe joint being blown apart. Even more concerning was the subsequent inability to shut off the water feeding into the damaged section of pipe,” he said.

While residents still had no supply, water continued flowing into the line for most of Thursday night and throughout Friday, preventing access to the pipe and making repairs impossible.

“At that point, we had water flowing into a broken line while residents still had no water at all. To date, no clear explanation has been provided as to why the line could not be isolated,” said Gilbert.

He said the water department was forced to shut off supply to two neighbouring suburbs in order to isolate the affected section and complete the repair.

Once this was done, the repair team worked through the night, and water was finally restored after the valves were opened slowly and correctly on January 24.

“This incident has highlighted serious systemic problems from valve infrastructure that appears to be seized or stripped, to an over-reliance on specific officials to perform basic operational functions. These are not extraordinary tasks; they are fundamental to managing a water network,” said Gilbert.

He called for an urgent review of the

• Water department’s operational procedures.
• Maintenance of critical valve infrastructure.
• Emergency response protocols.

“A community should never be without water for four days simply because systems don’t work and processes fail. This must be addressed as a matter of urgency,” he added.

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