The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is requesting all residents to assist by cutting water consumption by up to 50% over at least the next three days to avoid taps running dry.
Cllr Annette Lovemore, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Infrastructure, Engineering, Electricity and Energy, made this urgent call to residents following various factors that occurred simultaneously over a number of days.
“With your help, we cannot avoid this probable catastrophic situation, while the water levels in our reservoirs recover which could take approximately three weeks.
“The shutdown of the Churchill pipeline for leak detection purposes about two weeks ago, the electricity outage last weekend resulting in the inability to treat and distribute water for about two days and the additional pump failures at the Elandsjagt Water Treatment Works collaboratively caused the current situation.
“These factors in conjunction with high water usage by our residents resulted in not enough water being treated to meet the current demands.
“This caused the current bulk storage reservoir levels to stand now at between 10% and 15% which is critically low,” Cllr Lovemore said.
The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality requests the citizens to jointly assist in drastically cutting water consumption in order to avoid an impending water shortage disaster.
