Johannesburg – Rand Water on Friday announced that it was implementing more flow controls to safeguard reservoirs amid high consumption.
“The matter of high-water consumption and various call-to-action requests to our municipalities and consumers to use sparingly have relevance,” said Rand Water.
“Since the beginning of spring, Rand Waters bulk water provision to municipalities has increased from an average of 4 300 million litres of water a day to 4 900 million litres of water a day.”
There are approximately 17 million people in municipalities supplied by Rand Water.
On average, water consumption in Gauteng per person per day is over 300 litres against a worlds average of 173 litres per person per day.
“This is against the backdrop of Rand Water over-abstracting or exceeding its abstraction license by 400 million cubic metres (Mm3 ) of water per annum,” said Rand Water.
“To safeguard the integrity of the system and to ensure continued water supply, Rand Water imposed a water supply reduction of 30% so that there is still enough water in the reservoirs to mitigate, amongst the others, intermittent supply.”
Despite this, water consumption continues to rise, and reservoirs levels continue to decrease because of even higher water usage.
“To stabilise and avoid the emptying of the reservoirs and complete system crash, Rand Water will further apply the flow control management of its reservoirs,” said Rand Water.
“This measure will ensure that Rand Water takes full control of water supply and no longer relies on the consumers to reduce consumption.”
Rand Water said the application of flow control will be applied from 20h00 Friday evening (14 October 2022) until the system recovers.
Intermittent water supply may be expected in many areas within the following municipalities:
The City of Johannesburg,
The City of Ekurhuleni,
The City of Tshwane,
Rand West Local Municipality,
Mogale City Local Municipality and
Rustenburg Local Municipality
To avoid the intermittent water supply, consumers must reduce their consumption, advised Rand Water.
“We recommend that municipalities impose water restrictions through their by-laws and effectively police their implementations,” said Rend Water.
“We further recommend a ban on use of sprinkler systems for watering lawns, use of hosepipes to wash cars and clean pavements as some of the measures to save the situation.”
