Meeting to address St Lucia water supply concerns

uMkhanyakude District Municipality has scheduled a 14 February meeting with St Lucia ratepayers, residents and businesspeople to discuss the area’s water supply challenges.

This was arranged by Mayor Siphile Mdaka on Tuesday when he responded to a complaint from a resident of the town during a Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) consultative conference in Mtubatuba.

Mdaka said what necessitated the meeting was so a thorough clarification on work done by the municipality to address the area’s water supply issues could be presented to residents.

The mayor, however, briefly outlined that this includes upgrading Mtuba Waterworks so it pumps at its optimum capacity of 20 megalitres, an increase from the current 14 megalitres.

He further said the pumps at the waterworks need to be improved and its storage capacity of 30 megalitres utilised fully instead of the current 20.

“St Lucia is an important stakeholder,” responded Mdaka to Glenn de Gaspary.

De Gaspary had lamented that the current water supply to the tourist destination, which he said at a peak period in December hosted about 7 000 visitors, was insufficient and that this posed a threat to the local tourism sector.

According to him, at some point last year, the town went for 32 days without water, ‘and we had to make a plan’.

“We really need an intervention to sort out the water issue in St Lucia because we need tourism and tourism cannot operate without water,” he said.

The chairperson of the St Lucia Ratepayers’ Forum, Karel Viviers, has previously told the ZO that water supply in St Lucia remains ‘a significant challenge’.

“Despite recent projects to extend water supply, the already constrained supply has further diminished,” said Viviers previously.

The forum he chairs, he assured at the time, actively monitors the situation and works in collaboration with the district municipality and DWS to find solutions.

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