SA's water infrastructure is crumbling fast. Can government and the private sector collaborate and cooperate to fix it?
Last September, the South African Human Rights Commission released a damning report into water challenges in KwaZulu-Natal's municipalities. In March half of Johannesburg experienced weeks of severe water shortages, right in the middle of a late-summer heatwave. In July, large parts of Ekurhuleni were without water as the system struggled to recover from maintenance work by Rand Water. That was after flash floods hit the Western Cape, forcing at least 4,500 people from their homes as the province's stormwater systems failed to cope.
It never rains, but it pours. SA’s ongoing water crisis — characterised
by wild swings between floods and droughts - is bringing the crumbling state of its water infrastructure to the surface.
"Upgrading infrastructure to better manage erratic weather patterns is paramount", says Robert Erasmus, MD at Sanitech. "This includes maintaining stormwater infrastructure, building new dams with improved capacity to cope with floods and droughts, as well as repairing existing ones to minimise leakage".
Andries Fourie, senior technologist at SRK Consulting, agrees. "It's more economical to begin with the upkeep of stormwater infrastructure, restoring it to its intended capacity. This approach may not be a complete fix but offers a more practical starting point than constructing new facilities,‘ he says.
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