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Fingers pointed at city council as Nelson Mandela Bay water crisis worsens

Impofu Dam in Nelson Mandela Bay on 11 September 2018 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Netwerk24 / Lulama Zenzile)

The total water demand for the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro is approximately 300 megalitres (Ml) or 300 million litres per day, and the supply is rapidly dwindling. Civil society is responding to the crisis, but there is an undercurrent of concern that the city council is not doing enough.

On Monday 25 November 2019, the water level of the Mpofu Dam, a major supplier to Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB), was 17.46%. On the same day, the water levels of the other major dams that supply NMB were: Kouga (33.8%), Loerie (54.99%), Groendal (38.06%) and Churchill (100%).

The metro celebrated the recent rains that filled the Churchill Dam but the total percentage of water in its dams remains critically low in a region racked by protracted drought. In the last week of November the metro’s mayor, Mongameli Bobani, announced that he had signed the form required for the metro to be declared a drought disaster area. It should have been signed significantly earlier as it is the prerequisite for the metro to approach National Treasury for drought funding.

Mayoral Committee Member for Infrastructure Andile Lungisa, as quoted in The Herald newspaper, said such funding would enable the municipality to implement its drought interventions, including attending to water leaks, better monitoring of water meters and speeding up the drilling of boreholes. These management measures should long since have been in place.

NMB has had at least seven acting city managers since September 2018, which speaks of the political instability and associated management issues in municipal administration. Recognising that this is probably not going to be resolved in the near future, the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber and citizens are lobbying for efficient water, energy, security and waste management, and doing as much as they can to keep operating and building their own resilience.

The CEO of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, Nomkhita Mona, says:

“We have a number of priority task teams to achieve our strategy of ‘How to Build a City’. Our Water Task Team is made up of relevant experts from member companies and civil society. We continue to put pressure on the municipality to respond to the water crisis, including reducing the over 33% of water loss through leaks, and ensuring accurate billing for usage.

“At the same time, we are engaging citizens and business and community leaders about the water crisis, and sharing best practice on how to use potable water sparingly, consume less (and get charged less), and reuse water as efficiently as possible.”

Metro-based development economist and Water Task Team member Wendy McCallum has assessed the impact of water on the Metro’s economy:

“If we, as civil society and corporate citizens of our city were to reduce water usage by 10% until 2030, we would be able to generate almost 1,000 new jobs in the city. These jobs would be created as a result of increased investment because water ‘saved’ would be available to be used by new industries or businesses in the city.

“In addition, if the municipality were to better manage water infrastructure, including reducing the loss of water due to leaks (which do not generate any revenue for the municipality), we would be able to create almost 500 new jobs in the city. That’s 1,500 new jobs if we as government, private sector and citizens of our city work together to save precious resources.”

A resident from the western areas who chooses not be named for fear of being targeted says:

“As citizens, we are restricted to 500 litres of water per household per day, yet the municipality fails to attend to the thousands of leaks in the metro. We report leaks and then watch hundreds of thousands of litres running down the road before they do respond. We are doing what we can, but what is the municipality doing?

To limit their household water use, the resident says: “We flush our toilets as little as possible, we have buckets in our showers, our showers are restricted to a minimum and our garden looks like a sandpit. We have installed a 5,000-litre water tank at our expense, but we need rain to fill it. We have the extra expense of buying drinking water because for the past six months our water has frequently been brown.

“It feels as if the treatment plants are not doing what they should be doing, or the dams are so low that we are fast approaching Day Zero. As citizens of the city, we do not know where we are, or what is being done about the water crisis as all the focus is on the electricity crisis. The leadership in the metro is not communicating what is going on. We are shell-shocked with all the crises we have to manage.”

At a metro-wide level, the Business Chamber is collaborating with a number of partners, including the German development agency GIZ and the University of Toulouse, France, to share best practice and implement solutions for water sustainability. Several companies have been very proactive about this.

One of the largest companies in the metro is VW SA in Uitenhage, whose plant engineer, Nick Chapman, is a member of the Business Chamber’s Water Task Team.

“The task team started working on solutions to the water crisis 10 years ago during the 2008/9 drought. The current drought is the second major drought in the last 10 years,” he says.

“At VW, our municipal water ultimately comes from the Gariep water supply and we are completely reliant on this. The quantity of water we require is such that we cannot store this amount of water at our plant. If the water supply ran out, we would not be able to operate.

“Over the past 10 years we have made a concerted effort to reduce our water use. In 2011 we were using 6.12 kilolitres [kl] per vehicle produced; at the end of September 2019 we were down to 2.09kl per vehicle.”

To achieve these usage reductions, several key changes have been made, as Chapman explains:

“One example is we changed our electrocoating system [that protects the metal from corrosion] to a new chemical called Gardo Bond. Instead of having to rinse the chemical dipping tank twice each month as we had to do with the previous chemical, now we only need to do it every six months, which has resulted in significant water and energy savings and cost reductions.”

VW SA was one of the first VW plants in the world to do this.

Jo-Ann Daniels, a citizen of Westering in the metro says: “As a family we decided we had to make a difference, not only to save water but to help our kids to understand why we all need to save water. We explain it is not about the rands and cents, it is about the actual resource and the trouble we will be in if we open the tap and nothing comes out.”

Daniels says over the past three years, water saving has become part of their family’s lifestyle and they are using far less than the restriction of 500 litres of water per household day, which has reduced their water bill to about R300 per month. Residential water tariffs are, however, not fixed: the more water residents use, the more they pay. Many households are keeping within the restriction, but many others are not, despite the drought.

“Water has become a luxury and there should be far more awareness throughout the metro to educate everyone about water,” says Daniels.

“We use every bit of water in our home. We use our tank water to do our washing, we use the washing and rinsing water [grey water] for general household cleaning. We shower for no longer than two minutes and have buckets to catch the shower water, which we then use to flush our toilets and for mopping. We only do dishes once a day and we sparingly flush our toilets. We have also made peace with the fact that we cannot have a nice green, lush garden and we have started planting indigenous shrubs that need less water. We will continue saving water even when it finally rains.”

One of the largest businesses and employers in the metro is Nelson Mandela University. Dr Andre Hefer, the university’s sustainability engineer and a member of the Business Chamber Water Task Team, who is leading the university’s broad-based water conservation drive, explains:

“The current overall water utility bill of the university across our seven campuses is approximately R10-million. The University’s North and South Campuses in Summerstrand require up to 1.5 megalitres or 1.5 million litres per day during peak periods. Our strategic objective in terms of water usage and management is to increase the use of secondary sources of water return effluent (RE) or ‘new’ water, as well as borehole water, rainwater and grey water to diversify our water source, reduce our reliance on a potable municipal supply and benefit from the cost savings.”

Hefer says the university’s sport fields account for about 20% of their total water use. Instead of using potable water, they are buying water from the Cape Recife Waste Water Treatment Works, which generates a quality of RE or ‘new’ water to a standard that is safe for irrigation.

“The water is stored in our new 1.3Ml holding dam and we pay approximately R2.20 per kl as opposed to R17 per kl for municipal water. It makes good water and economic sense. Our new residences are also geared towards the use of new water for the flushing of toilets and urinals. We’re busy working on the teething issues with this, but it’s a massive solution for us and for South Africa.”

Summerstrand residents Bev and Neill Erickson have been on a water saving drive since the 2008/9 drought, as they explain:

“Water is a finite resource. When there is no water, no matter how much money you have or don’t have, it won’t be there.”

To conserve water they downpipe all rainwater from the roof into water tanks.

“We have students staying with us and all the water from showers in our household is piped to water tanks which we use for flushing toilets and the garden. We use water from additional water tanks for the swimming pool; never municipal water.”

As voiced by many residents, what concerns the Ericksons is the metro’s lack of attention to water leaks.

“We are constantly phoning in to report them. We have had major pipe leaks in our road because of failing infrastructure. We had a leak for a month before they fixed it. This cannot be acceptable when we are in a state of emergency.”

A long-standing Business Chamber member and member of the Water Task Team, Jonty Wattrus is the director of a company called Watelec in the metro that markets and manages SABS-approved pay-as-you-go water and electricity meters.

Wattrus explains: “Municipal infrastructure has not been sufficiently maintained or kept up with population growth. Our task team collaborates with some good people in the municipality who are trying hard to improve the situation where a lot of money is not used effectively.”

The task team is independently working with businesses and residential users in the Metro to reduce their water use, “but we can only go so far because ultimately the municipality is in control of the metro’s bulk water supply,” says Wattrus.

“Industry does not get limited in terms of how much water it uses, and commercial water tariffs are fixed because the municipality does not want to stymie infrastructure and the metro needs development and jobs.

“Everyone expects the municipality to solve the water crisis and they certainly need to take responsibility and implement solutions as a matter of urgency, but water use starts with the person using the water, and each one of us needs to ensure that we are not wasting water. A leaking toilet, for example, can significantly increase water use and the water bill.”

Watelec works with numerous landlords and body corporates. The pay-as-you-go water meters control how much water each tenant uses, and the tenant pays, as opposed to the landlord or body corporate receiving one large bill and trying to extract payment from tenants.

“The pre-paid system empowers the individual to understand how much they are using and how much it costs,” says Wattrus.

At all levels, this is what we need to achieve. Every citizen needs to understand where water comes from, that it is a precious resource and it needs to be treated with total respect.

As Chapman from VW SA puts it, without water their massive plant would have to close down. The same applies to businesses big and small throughout the metro. The consequences would be horrible. DM

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