By: Natasha Archary
The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Gauteng says the party’s representatives have been inundated with calls from distressed residents who are still facing water outages and interruption to water supply.
DA Benoni Constituency Head, Haseena Ismail says the situation in unacceptable and requires immediate attention.
Ismail says residents of Benoni have had no water for several days at a time, and this is a breach of residents’ constitutional rights.
“During a recent oversight visit to Rand Water reservoirs in the City of Ekurhuleni, it was observed that the generator at Cloverdene remains non-operational despite repeated efforts by the DA to urge action on the issue.
Furthermore, there is no generator at Slatterville to ensure function during loadshedding and the new reservoir at Vlakfontein is yet to be operational.
In response to a parliamentary query I submitted to the Minister of Water and Sanitation regarding the steps taken by Rand Water to ensure a stable supply of water, it was highlighted that Rand Water is implementing strategies towards an energy-efficient approach, one of which includes the installation of generators to mitigate energy supply issues.”
DA Gauteng says it will continue to fight Rand Water over constitutional right to clean water
This comes after several parts of Johannesburg were left with taps running dry for most of the month after an outage in Soweto affected Rand Water’s ability to supply water to a number of areas.
The outage took days for the water supplier to rectify, with some areas still without water, relying on water tankers due to the systems being unable to restore.
To make matters worse, a contamination issue in Bergbron left residents without water for 16-days, as teams struggled to flush raw sewage that had seeped into clean water supply.
The DA Gauteng says it will continue to highlight the plight of residents and fight for their rights at all spheres of government until the supply of water has been restored to residents.
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