Nelson Mandela Bay’s water supply is at a critical point, and residents and businesses need to drastically reduce their consumption or face the reality of water-shedding along with load-shedding.
The metro’s water consumption has not dropped meaningfully in the past two years despite warnings and repeated pleas from the Municipality, the Business Chamber and other authorities, and the Bay is now in the 8th year of the most severe drought in history with its supply dams at record low levels.
“Despite the best efforts of some businesses and residents, not enough people are taking the situation seriously and we are simply using too much water, at 50 megaliters (ML) per day over the target of 230ML/day. We have become complacent about water use and saving water, partly due to focus shifting to the loadshedding crisis, but we cannot take our eyes off this ball.
“The risk of areas of the metro intermittently running out of water remains extremely high, and Nooitgedacht is not the silver bullet everyone imagines it to be,” Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen warned.
She said security of investment and jobs, and an economic environment to conducive to growth, was dependent on security of water supply and creating a water-resilient future for the Bay.
The Business Chamber welcomed the Municipality’s announcements of last week on progress of the R1.2 billion water augmentation and drought mitigation plan by the metro and the Department of Water and Sanitation.
Van Huyssteen said while phase 3 of the Nooitgedacht treatment works had increased the metro’s supply from the Gariep Dam, it was still not sufficient to meet demand and was not connected to the entire metro. Meanwhile, the planned phase 4 of Nooitgedacht would be a long-term mega project, requiring substantial national government funding.
However, Van Huyssteen said that while it was critical for the Municipality to improve the Bay’s security of water supply, so too was making improvements on the demand-side, requiring consumers to accept that we live in a water-scarce region, cut water consumption, harvest rainwater and re-use grey water.
“We acknowledge that consumers lay the blame for the crisis at the lack of maintenance of the metro’s water infrastructure and are thus reluctant to play their part and reduce their water consumption. They have a valid point, but in order to create a water resilient future, we all have to take responsibility and play our part – the Municipality on the supply side and consumers on the demand side.”
“Water demand currently exceeds available supply, even without factoring in the various problems on the supply side. Consumers who waste water, don’t re-use greywater and, worst of all, fill tanks meant for rainwater with municipal water, are making the problem worse.”
“It is time that the message sinks in that we live in a water-scarce area, and that we need to become water-resilient and self-reliant. This is not only up to government, but to all of us as individuals, households and businesses,” she said.
Van Huyssteen emphasised that while the water augmentation measures currently underway are necessary and very welcome, the Municipality needs also to get the basics right – enforce bylaws, curb water theft and vandalism of infrastructure, monitor and ensure correct meter readings, and fix leaks.
“It is unacceptable that 44% of our treated water is ‘non-revenue’ water, in other words it is stolen or wasted without being billed, and over 30% of this is due to leaks,” she said.
The Chamber’s Adopt-a-Leak intervention closed out at the end of 2022, with local businesses contributing voluntarily to a project that saved 1.6 million litres of water a day by repairing leaks in over 4 200 households, and resulting in a 23% drop in water consumption across seven areas of the Metro.
Van Huyssteen said the initiative had shown the way to addressing leaks by targeting hotspot areas and measuring progress by litres saved rather than number of leaks. “We have shared the lessons learned and best practices from this project, and hope that these will be adopted by the Municipality in order to pursue a more high impact approach to leak reduction in the quickest possible time,” she said.
With dams currently at 14,46% of total capacity (of which only 9,04% is available for extraction, the national Department of Water and Sanitation and the Amatola Water Board have warned that the metro may face further restrictions on the amount of water it can extract from the dams, making water augmentation measures even more critical and urgent.
Van Huyssteen urged businesses and households to cut water consumption, re-use grey water and invest as far as possible in water-harvesting measures such as harvesting from roofs and installing water tanks.
She also called on restaurants, accommodation establishments and shopping malls to restrict their water consumption – for example, low-flow toilets and water-saving taps – and to participate with prominent signage calling on patrons to be cautious on water usage.
The Business Chamber’s water task team lead Basil Mugwagwa said that in a resource-scarce environment, businesses need to be responsible by using less resources to achieve the same goals without compromising quality.
“Process optimisation, using less energy and water to achieve the same output, need not always cost money. Well executed maintenance programmes are a source of efficiency – where heat transfer, process flow and process cooling are concerned, clean, efficient systems will demand less water than equipment that is not optimally maintained. “In a typical industrial operation, there is always wastewater from processes and this water should be harvested and re-used in other non-critical processes. Water can be harvested and used in ablutions and other grey water applications. Depending on what a company does in its processes, there is an array of functions where recycled water can be deployed.”
Mugwagwa also highlighted that most large businesses have the advantage of roof space availability for rainwater harvesting to reduce demand for municipal water.