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Yeoville residents say taps are still dry despite Joburg Water claiming to have resolved supply issue

Yeoville residents say taps are still dry despite Joburg Water claiming to have resolved supply issue
A tanker delivers water in Yeoville on 8 May 2023. (Photo: Twitter / @JHBWater)
Michelle Banda
By Michelle Banda
16 May 2023
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In a Daily Maverick article on 11 May, Johannesburg Water claimed that operations had resumed on 9 May at the Yeoville pump station, which faced challenges at the end of March after flooding. However, some residents of the suburb say they still don’t have water, while others are experiencing lower water pressures almost a week after the repair job.

It was only on Saturday, 13 May, that residents of the Yeoville Tower zone and high-lying areas had water coming from their taps, which ran dry on 6 May, although Johannesburg Water insisted the issue was resolved on Tuesday, 9 May. 




According to Johannesburg Water, “Operational challenges at the Yeoville reservoir on Thursday, 30 March 2023, resulted in the pump station overflooding, and this led to the damaging of the electrical pumping infrastructure. Two of the electrical pumping components were damaged, but on Sunday, 2 April, Johannesburg Water engineering teams were able to salvage one pump set which has been operational since the overflooding until it also stopped working following load shedding on Monday, 1 May, causing water outages in some areas of the city.” 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Joburg Water – here are their answers to our burning questions about the supply crisis 

Joburg Water spokesperson Nolwazi Dhlamini added: “In the process of trying to salvage the only pump which has been working since the flooding, two additional motors were damaged, and this resulted in no pumping operations to the Yeoville high-lying areas. However, there needs to be at least two pump sets operational in order to supply high-lying areas.” 

“We are at the highest point of Yeoville … and we need pumps to get water, unlike low-lying areas who got water almost exactly after the repair job,” said a resident, who did not want to be named. 

Another said: “It’s not a new fault that the pumps are damaged and we don’t have water. Even after the pump was repaired on Tuesday, some days in the week we still did not have water in the afternoons or late at night.

“The pressure is still very low but we appreciate that at least we have water in our taps and we are storing some in the sinks, tub, buckets and bottles, though our use of it is really minimised with this pressure. This means we can’t do laundry or take baths more than once because we use basins and that water is used for flushing. It’s like we have water but we don’t have it.” 

joburg water A tanker delivers water in Yeoville on 8 May 2023. (Photo: Twitter / @JHBWater)



Yeoville resident Richard Holden said: “It appears to be a problem other than the pump but there does not seem much effort to try and identify the faults. The entire road around the back of the Yeoville reservoirs was without water. Starting from the intersection of Bezuidenhout and Durban … on one side of the road the buildings have water but on the other they do not. 

“As of yesterday [Sunday], they were finally getting water at low pressure into the buildings on Highlands Street. I spoke to the tanker driver and there are very specific buildings and streets in Yeoville and Berea that are not getting water even after the pump was repaired.” 

DA MPL Nico de Jager said years of neglect in upgrading and maintaining the electrical pumps were affecting their capacity, which Joburg Water’s Dhlamini denied.   

Joburg Water says efforts to repair the pump set are ongoing and it is appointing a service provider.  

“Subsequent to the incident of 30 March 2023, Johannesburg Water embarked on an emergency tender process to procure the damaged electrical components for two pump sets. The tender process closed on Wednesday, 3 May, and is currently being evaluated with the intention to appoint a service provider by the end of May,” said Dhlamini. DM

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