Eskom agrees to exempt crucial Nelson Mandela Bay dam from rolling blackouts

For the past few weeks, the water-stressed Nelson Mandela Bay has been hit by another crisis as rolling blackouts prevented water from being pumped from the metro’s fullest dam, the Churchill Dam. 

Water shortages caused outages in more than 40 suburbs and key points, and engineers had to divert water to the St Albans prison as an emergency measure. The metro no longer has enough water to meet demand, and the situation has been worsened by rolling blackouts.  

On Wednesday, Nelson Mandela Bay Mayor Retief Odendaal said he would take Eskom to court if it refused to exempt the Churchill Dam from rolling blackouts.  

“The crisis with load shedding has rubbed salt into the wounds by negatively affecting the water distribution to the city’s reservoirs. As much as the city has worked out a plan to cushion the water intake into the reservoirs and for storage and distribution to the consumers, the severity of load shedding has put a strain on the system,” said Nelson Mandela Bay’s water distribution director, Joseph Tsatsire.

“We are working around the clock to use our existing infrastructure to reroute water to the strained areas for the reservoirs to fill up; however, the high consumption remains a challenge. We continue to interact with Eskom so that we can improve our systems to improve the situation to be much more stable.”