Drought-hit Nelson Mandela Bay on tenterhooks as weather models predict heavy rain

The South African Weather Service has its eye on a weather system that might bring significant rain to the supply dam catchment areas in Nelson Mandela Bay by next week, if it lives up to what preliminary models show, weather forecaster Garth Sampson said on Tuesday. 

Sampson said Nelson Mandela Bay is in the seventh year of a drought.

Last month —  August is peak rainfall for the area —  it received the most rain since August 2006, with 136mm measured at the airport, 66.6mm at Joubertina and 86.8mm at Kareedouw, where the metro’s supply dams are situated.

Sampson said the current prediction is for the weekend and next week, and therefore quite far ahead.

“We are expecting some good falls,” he said. 

---

Visit Daily Maverick's home page for more news, analysis and investigations

---

Sampson said he was concerned that retention ponds in parts of the city had become “black wattle forests”, and that parts of the Baakens River are also blocked by black wattle trees —  a far from ideal situation should there be a flood.

The weather pattern that enduring droughts are broken by floods has been well established in the Nelson Mandela Bay region for decades. For the past seven years, the metro has been in a devastating drought cycle that saw dams almost running dry earlier this year and residents and businesses preparing for the worst.

Aside from the water crisis, the city was also hit by waves of political instability, which only served to compound the effects of the drought.

Positive briefing

Senior director for water and sanitation in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, Barry Martin, gave the most positive briefing since the crisis began, saying there was water for 350 days in the Churchill Dam and 238 days in the Kouga Dam. Total usable water is now at 12% of dam capacity. 

He warned that the city was not quite out of the woods yet: “People must still save water.”

Martin said the metro was still restricted to only 40% of its daily quota. He said there had been a decline in water usage, but the target of 230 megalitres a day had not yet been met. 

Martin said the Nooitgedacht scheme, bringing water from the Gariep Dam, now produced more water.

Water leaks

He said an intensive effort to fix water leaks in the metro had led to contracts being paused — contractors reached their agreed-upon limits and the council had to apply for a deviation. Thousands of leaks were fixed this year, but before that, many reported leaks and long turnaround times to repair them hampered the metro’s efforts to persuade residents to save water.

According to a presentation delivered by Martin to the Joint Operations Committee, 1,650 leaks are outstanding at the moment, and leak repairs are progressing well.

An initiative by the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber to fix leaks has already saved the metro five million litres of water a day. Martin explained that, because the Business Chamber’s teams were working in areas where the water could be isolated, it was easier to measure the impact of their work.

Nooitgedacht project

He said a dispute over the contractor for upgrades to a pump station distributing Nooitgedacht water to the city has been resolved and Phase 3 of the Nooitgedacht project will be handed over in September. This means more water will become available to the city from the scheme. 

Martin added that a global shortage of microchips had delayed the commissioning of boreholes, but he was hopeful that boreholes drilled around the metro will come online in September and October.

The metro is presently dealing with an extended water outage in part of the city after a pump broke at the Schoenmakerskop pump station on 8 September. The metro hoped to complete repairs by Wednesday. DM/MC/OBP