Linden system could take three days to recover ‘if there’s proper supply’

Joburg Water says it will take two to three days for the Linden system — among those affected by an outage at Rand Water's Eikenhof pump station — to recover, but only “if we get a proper supply in the system”.

The water supplier on Tuesday took journalists on a tour of their facilities but denied it was an attempt to sanitise their image amid the water supply crisis that has affected parts of Joburg in the past two weeks.

Linden 1 and Blairgowrie reservoirs are among the worst hit as both are “struggling with low incoming supply pressure and volumes”, Joburg Water said on Monday.

The others are in Roodepoort, Soweto, Johannesburg Central and South. 

Joburg Water hosted a visit to three of its five reservoir complexes in the Sandton system.

They include Bryanston, the biggest in Joburg Water's network, Marlboro, Illovo Morningside and Linbro Park. All five have a 240.4-megalitre storage capacity and supply water to Sandton, Alexandra, Lombardy East and Dainfern, among others.

The Sandton system also houses two direct feeds, Linbro Park and Marlboro.

The tour was led by Johannesburg Water's electromechanical manager Gugulethu Quma, who used the briefing to not only speak on the system itself and the challenges it faces, but the ongoing water crisis affecting large swathes of the city.

Speaking on the situation, he said: “Right now we are busy doing everything that we can, working the line, checking everything that we can, doing watershifting and closing some of the downstream systems that are not necessarily affected to enable us to get the supply to the Linden community.

“Unfortunately Linden is the highest point in the system which means gravity is against us and, in this case, all of the systems are fed from the Waterval system (Linden 1 [the highest], Linden 2 [centre], Kensington B [lowest]) in that system as well as Blairgowrie, which is now being supplied internally by Joburg Water from Linden 1.

“All of those systems are affected by the entire outage that occurred eight to nine days ago and those customers are still relying on alternative water supply,” he added. 

Quma poured cold water over say that Tuesday's tour was an attempt to paint the entity in a good light amid the intense criticism of its handling of the crisis.

Joburg Water has come under fire since the crisis erupted, mainly over the length of the outage in Randburg and the deployment of water tankers to affected areas.

“The media tour was arranged way before the outage and current crisis so I do not believe [its aim] is necessarily to address the image.

“We wanted to inform residents, particularly in Sandton, where they are getting their water from, where our challenges are and what is available,” he said.

Providing an update on how soon the entity expects the Linden system to recover, Quma said Joburg Water was relying on the next two days to provide a “better view of how the system is going to perform”.

He said the team operating in the Eikenhof system was “doing everything to ensure that we normalise and stabilise supply”.

“At this stage, the reservoirs are empty but we will be able to get a better picture once the technical investigations and the [combined] team between Joburg Water and Rand Water have done a second investigation to see what the challenges are.

“If we do get a proper supply, it will take two to three days to recover because the reservoirs in the Linden system will start from Kensington B and Linden 2.  Linden 1 will recover last, being the highest, so we'll give it two to three days, including Blairgowrie, to recover.

“But within those days, the system itself will recover because the reservoirs themselves will not take water which will first flow to household taps before it starts filling the reservoirs. So two days is for reservoir recovery but once there's water flowing through the system, we'll have some form of supply.”

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