KZN's South Coast residents lose hope after monthlong water cut-offs

41 - that's the number of days that residents of the KwaZulu-Natal Lower South Coast have had some semblance of running water from their taps this year.

This is according to Banners Rest resident and former municipal councillor Dave Watson, who has been keeping a spreadsheet calendar on water cut-offs and interruptions since 2022. Watson said the last time his area had an uninterrupted water supply for longer than 24 hours was last year. During the current outage Watson has been without water for 32 days.

“This is a new record for us in Banners Rest, after more than three years of no water supply or inadequate water supplies,” Watson said.

In response to queries from the Daily Maverick on Monday, 18 August, the Ugu District Municipality said: “It is anticipated that water supply will be restored to Leisure Bay, Glenmore, Port Edward and Banners Rest by this evening or early tomorrow.”

But residents were not holding their breath.

A 12-hour electricity shutdown at the Umtamvuna Water Treatment Works led to water cut-offs that have dragged on for weeks, to the frustration of nearly 190,000 residents stretched between Port Edward in the south, Southbroom in the north and inland areas that include Izingolweni, KwaXolo and KwaNzimakwe.

“Tomorrow never seems to come. We were told yesterday that water was coming back ‘tomorrow’, and the same story the day before … yet, here we are with no water after nearly 30 days — so let’s wait and see tomorrow,” commented Democratic Alliance ward councillor Stephanie Breedt.

Breedt noted that Eskom had been scheduled to shut down the power supply at the Umtamvuna purification plant for half a day earlier this month to enable the installation of a temporary power supply that would have allowed an extra water extraction pump to be installed.

She noted that the Ugu District Municipality had been plagued by water shortages for several years, partly because there was insufficient electricity to power additional water abstraction pumps on the Umtamvuna River.

In 2019, the council paid Eskom R14-million to install additional power that would allow four pumps to suck water from the river for purification. Breedt said a further R2.5-million was paid to Eskom this year to provide a temporary supply to a third pump.

Eskom did conduct emergency work at the Umtamvuna treatment works this month, yet for reasons not fully explained, 36 local water reservoirs dried up soon afterwards and Ugu was forced to revert to using its existing two pumps rather than the hoped-for three pumps.

Veteran journalist Fred Kockott, a resident of Port Edward and founding director of Roving Reporters, was heading off to the local Methodist church on his motorbike to replenish his water supplies when contacted for comment on 18 August.

For the last 30 days, Kockott has been travelling to the church regularly to ferry water home in a backpack and a wooden crate strapped to his motorbike.

Permanent solution

While the current crisis might be resolved by “Band-Aid” measures, he said a permanent solution was needed.

“Granted, there are serious challenges faced in extending basic water supply to previously unserviced outlying areas, but to allow existing infrastructure to collapse to this extent is clearly a human rights offence, deserving intervention and prosecution.”

Two separate sources have suggested that the underlying cause of the latest problems is opposition from a community group in the neighbouring Eastern Cape province that blocked plans to run a new Eskom power supply line from that province into KwaZulu-Natal to relieve the power shortages at the Umtamvuna purification works.

They suggested that certain community members had insisted that they were facing water and electricity supply shortages that should be resolved before any additional power was supplied to KZN.

The Ugu District Municipality said that Eskom had conducted a scheduled shutdown at Umtamvuna this month to connect additional power supplies, but “unforeseen technical complications arose during the process, and work is currently ongoing to resolve these issues”.

The municipality acknowledged that this led to “significant inconvenience for both the coastal and inland communities” and that municipal staff were collaborating with Eskom’s Eastern Cape technical division to provide further power to the Umtamvuna water works.

On Monday, an Eskom spokesperson said the utility required more time to respond to Daily Maverick’s queries.

We also asked Ugu officials to explain the full nature of the “unforeseen technical complications”.

A municipal spokesperson responded: “Following the restoration of power, it was subsequently identified that a voltage imbalance had occurred, thereby compromising the safety and stability of the electricity supply.

“This unforeseen technical issue necessitated an extension of the outage period. We regret that this extension resulted in the depletion of the Umtamvuna water system.

“Eskom has scheduled a planned outage for 29 August in order to rectify the situation and install the meter required for the Eastern Cape supply. In the interim, Ugu has reverted to the original KwaZulu-Natal grid to ensure continuity of water supply.”

What this seems to mean is that even if the water supply is restored this week, Lower South Coast residents can anticipate another major water shutdown at the end of the month before the situation improves. DM