Meet the man whose job it is to keep Cape Town from running dry

Frans Jacobus Tredoux, manager of the Steenbras Scheme water treatment plant has some home truths to tell us about the country's water supply, writes Bobby Jordan

There is a moment straight after the first winter rains in Cape Town when I always think of Frans Jacobus Tredoux. It is the moment Table Mountain sits up and shakes off its duvet of clouds, to reveal a face full of waterfalls, cheeks streaked with tears, hair ruffled and studded with crooked rainbows.

From a distance it looks like the mountain has burst, such is the deluge spilling off the summit.

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I like to think of Tredoux taking it all in, standing on his stoep, smiling as if the heavens just turned his moer coffee to gold dust. Then he chuckles to himself, pours his gold dust into his smile, and heads up the road to his office at the Steenbras scheme water treatment plant.

Tredoux and I go back a long way, or at least I go back a long way with him. I have wondered about him since I was a kid, since before I even knew his name. The dam man. The guy on the hill who gets paid to mess around with puddles. Just like in the sandpit, but with big water and concrete retaining walls.

I have wondered what it must be like to manage all that water, collect it and store it, clean it, then send it off into the thirsty city below.

Does it bother him that we all depend on him so much, or does Tredoux just go with the flow?

Finally I am on my way to him, battling up the mountainside behind Gordon's Bay into the teeth of a gale-force south-easter.

There is another reason I want to meet Tredoux that has nothing to do with childhood heroes and everything to do with Cape Town's dwindling water supply.

Of late I have been feeling a bit panicky about the wet stuff from the sky. My heart races every Wednesday morning when I open the newspaper to check the updated metropolitan reservoir levels: Steenbras Upper 71.1%, Steenbras Lower 38.1%, Theewaterskloof 36.8%. Thirty-six percent? At this time of year? Tredoux must be in a flat spin.

Thus have I worried about a man as obsessed as I am with municipal water storage.

Dam statistics may seem like an insignificant speck of information beneath the Cape Times crossword puzzle, but for some they are the arithmetic of Armageddon.

block_quotes_start Dam statistics may seem like an insignificant speck of information beneath the Cape Times crossword puzzle, but for some they are the arithmetic of Armageddon block_quotes_end

Already in the parking lot it is obvious that Tredoux is no ordinary wage slave. His office rises out of a mountaintop in phallic splendour, an imposing brick edifice redolent of grand apartheid. A foyer big enough to park a submarine leads up a flight of stairs to another foyer inlaid with a massive digital display board flickering with flow rates, pressure readings and storage volumes - live dam statistics, on tap, pixelating and percolating.

Tredoux cannot be far away. One flight of stairs later we step into a cavernous room dominated by a long dark-wood table, at the far end of which several figures stir in the gloom.

For a man who loves the sight of gushing water, Tredoux has endured a horribly dry spell of late, and the few drops on his brow when I greet him are not caused by room temperature. He is almost exactly as I'd imagined: solid, avuncular, generally cheerful and down-to-earth, just a faint hint of water-saving punctiliousness that is surely the hallmark of his profession.

He is equally comfortable talking about Stormers rugby - he has team memorabilia on display - or his store-room full of chlorine necessary for purification. His cropped snor, neither too long nor too short, is an ornamental garden fed by a pair of settling-pool eyes.

He is genuinely surprised, and appears to cast his mind back a great distance when I kick off with some questions about his personal life.

Tredoux grew up on a farm outside Velddrif on the West Coast where water conservation was a way of life.

"You needed to work to keep it," he recalls wistfully. "With the crops outside you must look up and say thank you when there is water coming."

Farm life also taught him basic engineering skills that must be a comfort in the gargantuan task of managing the web of inlet and outlet pipes gurgling around us. A career in water treatment was a natural progression from farm work, but he could not have foreseen the circuitous flow of a career now spanning 40 years.

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After studying in Pretoria he worked on dam maintenance for the Department of Water Affairs, based in Moorreesburg not far from where he grew up. He then took up a vacant post with the City of Cape Town and moved to Wemmershoek, and from there to the city's treatment plant at Constantia Nek. Finally, in 1986, he moved to his current domain, the Steenbras Dam, spurred by a love for the Boland.

"It is a bigger plant and I felt I wanted to move to the Boland area," he explains. "I took over management of the plant in 1999, and became the scheme manager for the entire area in 2007."

In November last year he clocked up 35 years' service for the city.

The  magnitude of Tredoux's job begins to take shape only after he packs us into his double-cab 4x4 for a tour of the premises. A tar road lined with gnarled trees leads over the mountain ridge then fans out across the upper reaches of the Steenbras Valley.

What might appear to be one dam, visible from the N2 highway close to Sir Lowry's Pass, is in fact three dams set among pine plantations and pristine fynbos - a 7,800-hectare dominion that is Tredoux's stomping ground.

Water from the adjoining Palmiet River valley is pumped into Rockview Dam near the top of the estate, and used to augment supply in the two lower dams, Steenbras Upper and Steenbras Lower.

Tredoux shuttles us between all three via his favourite short cuts, pointing out places of interest, such as a large colony of beehives, and an island that, rather mysteriously, burst into flame during the last major fire season - the work of arsonists, he believes.

"We found a body over there," he says at one point, wafting a hand in the direction of the large informal settlement outside Grabouw.

Up on the hill a heavily fortified electricity sub-station reveals evidence of cable theft. It has Tredoux muttering about "a possible inside job".

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As expected, Tredoux has a love-hate relationship with the weather. North-westers and black south-easters are his favourite winds - "they bring water into our catchment area" - but a hot summer south-easter can vaporise thousands of litres in a single day. When the rain falls, he feels immediate relief.

"It makes me feel very, very happy. I'm grateful and go onto my knees and say thank you," he says.

Topography, too, can be frustrating. He points to a distant skyline: "It can be pouring on that side of the mountain but we don't get a single millimetre."

On the Lower Steenbras dam wall we stop to admire the view down the valley that dips away towards False Bay. A manager's old stone cottage and an overgrown terraced garden impart a sense of faded glory. Tredoux says the days of unlimited water supply are long gone.

"I think a lot of people before took water for granted. All of a sudden we can see with climate change, and within our country, that a lot of areas are running dry. People are thinking, hey, I must watch it. I can't just open a tap."

Tredoux practises as well as preaches. Set amid a patch of mountain fynbos below the treatment plant, his home is a monument to sustainable water use. His bath and shower water goes to his trees, his washing-machine water provides for his plants.

"It is second nature to me," he says with pride.

One suspects the same goes for his day job; in his sprightly enthusiasm for all things dam, there is still a glimpse of the sandpit toddler with spade and hosepipe, except 60 years later the stakes are much higher - and supply is limited.

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Back in his office I ask about his daily work pressures. Does he fret about dam levels? "Oh yes. I want to know what is going on."

Thanks to his laptop and sophisticated City of Cape Town database, he can access relevant dam data at any time, including levels, pressures and flow rates of individual pipes.

"I can go in on any pipeline," he adds, confirming my suspicion that he too suffers from OCDD - obsessive-compulsive dam disorder.

Unfortunately for Tredoux, there are plenty of other statistics to obsess over, like water quality and flow dynamics, which he monitors from 5am. By the time most of his day staff clock in, at 7.30am, Tredoux has checked night-shift reading books, maintenance schedules and work orders.

"If there is a blockage in your pipework you must react with immediate effect. It could be 3am, Saturday or Sunday - it doesn't matter. I am on standby 24/7."

He must also ensure he doesn't inadvertently poison the city populace with the wrong cocktail of lime, chlorine, sodium aluminate and aluminium sulphate, some which are stored on site in vast quantities.

"You must be a mother, a father, a process person and a maintenance person," he says. "We must also operate and maintain turbines, one on duty and one standby with a back-up dieseline generator, because we generate our own power. We have 28km of overhead power lines with step up and down transformers."

He must also monitor wildfires and protest action - such as the recent unrest in Grabouw that spilled over to the Steenbras site.

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Of late he also worries about succession, and that his vast institutional knowledge is passed to the next generation.

"A lot of my colleagues before me have left and taken their knowledge with them - it is not being transferred. I told my staff I can't keep the knowledge to myself. They must carry on."

He concedes the work is not easy, but that is no reason not to get involved.

"We all make mistakes in life and life will give you uphill, but that is how you learn."

There is also the reward that comes from knowing your work is indispensable, even if nobody knows much about it. What matters most to Tredoux is keeping his head above water, preferably lots of it. The deeper the better in the dam business.

"I used to have a little thing on my letterheads - 'Water is life'," Tredoux says wistfully, walking me back to my car.

"To me that was always encouragement."