Three months, six residential areas, 2,696 household water leaks repaired, and 896,000l of water saved per day.
That’s almost a million litres of water which is now literally not going down the drain every day or, put differently, an additional 17,920 people able to access their allotted 50l per day.
If ever there was an illustration of how big problems are solved in small bites, it is in this impact of the Adopt-A-Leak initiative to address the crisis of the metro’s water losses — 41% of treated water is unaccounted for, at least 30% due to leaks and the rest to unauthorised, unbilled, consumption.
At any one time, the metro has been dealing with a backlog of more than 3,000 reported water leaks, a moving target with leaks repaired almost as fast as new ones are reported.
Under any circumstances, but especially in a drought, it is vital to put the “lost” water back into the distribution system.The less water is lost, the lower the risk of taps running dry and the less reliant we can be on the western dams.
Following on the success of its Adopt-a-School initiative, in which businesses have stepped in to repair leaks at about 73 schools, the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber rallied businesses willing to volunteer their time and resources to address the wider water leak problem.
With the municipality’s official go-ahead, the project started at the end of June in six “hotspot” residential areas identified due to suspected high levels of leaks.
High rates of water and sewerage night-flow (at a time when very low water usage is expected) suggest a problem of leaks, both internal to the properties and in their connections to the main supply.
The reason for focusing on residential properties, rather than the problem of leaks and burst pipes in the municipal reticulation system itself, is that leaks on the demand, or customer, side of the system account for a large portion of water losses but fall outside the municipality’s mandate.
The areas selected are lowincome residential areas in different parts of the Bay where the reality is that household maintenance is mostly far down the list of priorities with limited income, with items like food, electricity, transport and schooling taking precedence.
With a target of saving a million litres of water per day, the project is set for completion by the end of this month, with a further 668 identified leaks to be repaired.
The impact thus far has been substantial.
The daily average saving of 896kl per day recorded to date represents demand reduction of between 6% and 45% in the different areas — in other words, leaks in one area represented almost half of their daily water consumption.
We recruited 58 unemployed residents in each area to assist with the work, including 33 women and 22 youths, who now have the basic skills to identify and repair water leaks in their areas or find employment with plumbing contractors.
In the process, we have developed insights and best practices which are being freely shared with the municipality, and we hope that these will be implemented so that the lessons learnt from this voluntary private sector intervention can be rolled out across the metro.
Central to this is a shift in the approach to addressing water losses.
We deliberately set out to measure our performance in litres saved per day, calculated by comparing pre- and post-intervention water demand and night-flows.
This gives an accurate and quantifiable measure of performance, directly representing the increased quantity of water not wasted and thus available to the metro’s customers.
Measuring progress by the number of leaks reported and repaired tells you about the municipality’s service delivery response rate but gives no indication of the quantum of losses and the impact of repairing leaks.
Each of the leaks in isolation is quite small, and solving them is mostly quite simple, but together the impact is significant, highlighting that interventions to fix problems don’t always have to be large-scale or costly.
The project has also highlighted the value of a collective effort — working on their own, the businesses that volunteered their services to Adopt-a-Leak would not have been able to make the impact that we have done by working as a collective in a focused, results-driven way.
The municipality, providing the infrastructure information and water data, and the residents allowing access to their property, have been vital to the collective success of deploying private sector skills to a public problem.
It is also clear that in the building of RDP or low-income housing there needs to be a support system, perhaps through public-private partnerships, for the upkeep of infrastructure and homes in areas where residents are unable to afford this.
Without this, residential areas and housing developments will not be sustainable and the problem of leaks will continue.
If a million litres of water a day can be saved in just six areas, imagine what could be achieved by plugging lots of little leaks in every area of the metro?
