By: Nosipho Haya-Komisa
After heavy rain and flooding in the Buffalo City Metro Municipality, some areas were negatively affected by the storms as they were left without clean water.
Buffalo City Metro Municipality Executive Mayor Xola Pakati yesterday has assured the residents of the Metro that they are working tirelessly on the crisis of poor water quality.
“We want to assure the residents of the Metro that we are working over the clock to ensure that the situation is improved,” said Pakati.
Pakati further said the storms did not only kill and leave many people homeless and destitute but they also destroyed the infrastructure of the city.
“The infrastructure of our city was also hardest hit, more particularly roads, electrical infrastructure and buildings. The floods also negatively impacted on our water infrastructure and the quality of the water that residents of certain areas of our Metro complained about is one of the indicators of the magnitude of the floods,” he said.
The mayor said, to resolve the water crisis the Metro had to come up with various solutions.
“We are implementing several mitigation plans to recover the Umzonyana Water Supply System and amongst these are the following,
• We are providing water tankers to assist the affected areas.
• We have brought on board an external expert to advise on solutions to stabilise the system
• We will cut the water supply between 22h00 and 04h00 every evening to build up the storage for the high lying areas and this will be implemented until this system sufficiently recovers. This will not impact all the areas of the Metro,” he said.
Pakati said that the leadership of the Metro is going to constantly monitor the situation.
“As the political leadership of the institution we will be monitoring the water challenge daily and we will give regular updates to the residents of the affected areas up until the water distribution system is to the requisite standard.”