Joburg's water crisis sees decades of neglect fuelling infrastructure failures and community struggles

13 Dec 2024

Most of us remember the spectre of ‘Day-Zero’ in Cape Town a few years ago. The problems in Cape Town were largely because South Africa is a water-scarce country (that was drilled into us at school). The problems in Joburg are largely self-inflicted through poor maintenance and bad management. Laura Grant and Gemma Ritchie ‘dove’ into some of the water issues in Johannesburg.

Joburg has a water problem. It’s been brewing for years and it’s largely self-inflicted. The city’s water infrastructure is old and hasn’t been maintained properly, plus it hasn’t been upgraded to cope with the growing population.

The people living here have stoically adapted. Much as they did during the years of loadshedding when they bought solar panels to reduce their reliance on the unreliable grid, they’re now installing water tanks.

A day without water is worse than a day without electricity. Some of us have had desperate relatives arrive at our homes at 9pm with towels, toiletry bags and basins of dirty dishes. What can you do? Complain on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group, or take to the streets in protest like the residents of Coronationville did earlier this month? We decided to collect data.

Joburg’s water issues seem to fall into two broad categories:

Those caused by infrastructure breakages like pipe bursts (let’s call them emergency repairs), which require “unplanned maintenance”.

Those that are wider ranging and caused by problems with reservoirs and water towers.

Joburg Water also does “planned maintenance”, which includes things like cleaning reservoirs and relocating or installing new pipes. We compare this with the unplanned maintenance it reported during October and November in the chart below.

There were double the number of “unplanned maintenance” issues reported in the past two months than planned ones: 41 compared with 20. The unplanned maintenance affected 162 suburbs (see the map below), while planned maintenance had a daintier footprint of just over 100 suburbs. Some parts of Joburg seem to be unplanned maintenance “hotspots”, with suburbs within them having had five or six incidents in the past two months.

Some of the maintenance work was quick, taking less than a day. But some parts of Soweto had two weeks of what was euphemistically described as “water supply disruption” because of an unplanned structural investigation of the Jabulani reservoir. There are 41 instances for which we can only find the start date, so we don’t know how long they took to repair.

Joburg Water has 129 reservoirs and water towers. In the past two months, the water levels in at least 26 of them have been very low, critically low or empty, according to public updates by Joburg Water. The water supply to more than 440 suburbs was affected as a result.

There may be more, but it’s difficult to identify which suburbs are affected when Joburg Water refers only to problematic systems, such as the Commando, Randburg/Roodepoort systems, which are networks of multiple connected towers and reservoirs.

On 17 November 2024, for example, City Power did repairs to its Eikenhof substation, which affected a number of water systems. Joburg Water said the Commando system took more than a week to recover. The shaded area on the chart above represents this event, but we were not able to count the number of reservoirs and towers affected because they were not listed by Joburg Water.

Other reasons given for very low water levels are a burst pipe that caused the Honeydew reservoir to empty on 7 October. A surge in problems reported between 1 and 4 November was blamed on hot weather.

It’s difficult to identify the impact of these outages on residents because Joburg Water’s reports seldom include information about how long a problem lasts. But Coronationville residents protested in the streets on 26 November after six days without water, according to news reports, because of the Commando system’s problems.

Nine reservoirs/towers have been reported as having been very low to empty four or more times in the past two months:

Doornkop West Reservoir (12 times)

South Hills Tower (10)

Lenasia Hospital Hills Reservoir (9)

Diepsloot Reservoir (8)

Lenasia High Level Reservoir (8)

Power Park Reservoir (6)

Grand Central Tower (5)

Yoeville Reservoir (5)

Brixton Tower (4)

In November, the minister of water and sanitation announced a plan of action for Joburg’s water problems, which included “throttling the water supply”. This limiting officially began on 14 November. However, Joburg Water appears to have already been doing that — they were just calling it “switching systems off at night”.

Another problem Joburg has is the water lost because of leaking pipes and other faulty infrastructure. This loss is reported as “non-revenue water” in Joburg Water’s annual report. Since 2013, non-revenue water has increased from 35% to 46.1%. Not all non-revenue water is water lost to leaks — this is just 24.1% of it. Unbilled authorised consumption is 12.7%. This is water supplied to informal environments and used for network maintenance. The rest (9.4%) is “commercial losses”, described as illegal connections and meters. DM

First published by The Outlier

The Outlier team extracted information from Johannesburg Water’s unplanned and planned maintenance and system maintenance updates posted between 1 October and 30 November 2024 on its website and X account.

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