Gauteng Water Crisis | Rand Water completes Phase 1 of maintenance programme

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]To this now, Randwater says phase one of the maintenance program is completed.

[00:00:04]Now, phase one began yesterday and is expected to continue until the 2nd of June, according to the spokesperson, Mike Muller Simaru. Phase two will commence on the 17th of July. Randwater acknowledges that some areas will experience little to no water supply during the maintenance period. Now, residents are urged to use water sparingly and for more on this, we are now joined by a former director general of water and sanitation, as well as engineer Professor Mike Muller joins us now via our video link. And Prof, thank you so much for your time this evening here on SABC News. And let's start off here. What do you make of the latest Randwater maintenance project which is underway at the at the moment?

[00:00:47]>> Uh good afternoon to you and everybody and your viewers. Uh you know, I think where we should start is by just being very pleased that Randwater is doing regular maintenance.

[00:00:59]Uh you know, it's like your car. If you drive a car every 10,000 km or 15,000 km, you take it to the garage, they change the oil, they do your tighten a few bolts and change a few fittings.

[00:01:10]It's very important to do that. Now, this kind of maintenance for a 12 or 24 hours actually doesn't need to even interrupt water supply if we have enough reservoirs in the cities and towns which are supplied by Randwater to maintain the services while the tap is switched off. But, I think what we found is that the population has grown very fast.

[00:01:36]There's probably twice as many people in Gauteng as there were uh 20 years ago, and the storage capacity hasn't gone up as fast. And that means that when there's maintenance, instead of having a 24-hour reserve sitting in your uh reservoirs, you know, just to keep them uh the system going, that's reserve runs out much quicker and so we begin to see interruptions in in the supply areas.

[00:02:04]It's a good thing they're doing maintenance. It's a pity we don't have enough storage in the reservoirs of the cities to make sure that the maintenance interruptions don't interrupt our supply to our houses.

[00:02:17]>> Yeah. And perhaps maybe if you can also then just give us an insight in terms of what this maintenance entails and it means you make a very important note that you know previously we wouldn't see you know a complete water shutdown as this maintenance gets underway. So what is it exactly that's going to get underway while this maintenance we see right now is being you know conducted by Rand Water.

[00:02:43]>> Yeah, you know I'm I'm not in involved in any detail with Rand Water but you have things like pumps.

[00:02:51]Every now and again you have to change the bearings in in in the motors and the pumps.

[00:02:55]You have to do some anti-corrosion work.

[00:02:58]There there are various things that have to be done in a big mechanical system like a water supply system that every year or two years you change the parts, you do the lubrication, you you have to switch off some of the plant. And I think I'm not hearing us being talking about any sort of major big repairs. We're talking about normal maintenance. The question we ought to be asking is why isn't there sufficient reserve in the cities to tide us over for a you know 12 or 24 hours to allow normal maintenance to happen. In the same way when we take our car to the garage we make an arrangement to get a lift. Well, what we should be doing in the cities is making sure there's enough water in those reservoirs to see us through while the maintenance is underway.

[00:03:52]>> Let's also then look at the status of water infrastructure, particularly in Gauteng. I mean, we always hear you know, a municipality telling us about the issue around aging infrastructure. What does the status looking like when you look at Gauteng when it comes to its water infrastructure?

[00:04:12]>> Okay, I think let's start by remembering that over the last 20 or 30 years, the population of Gauteng has probably doubled and the number of houses which have got proper plumbing inside and proper sanitation have also increased.

[00:04:28]So, obviously there's more water that's going to be used, much more water and we have to provide the new infrastructure for that. And I think a lot of attention has been paid simply to getting the water from the source to the houses, to the new developments so that everyone does have access to a tap. But at the same time, we have to increase the amount of storage that's available and we have to increase the amount of water that's put into the system from Rand Water. And the trouble is if we're doing all of these new things and we're doing this expansion, it's very easy to put off the replacement of pipes which are 50, 60, 70 in Johannesburg, sometimes even a hundred years old and those pipes are old and leaky and beginning to lose water. So, what we're finding is there hasn't been enough attention paid to replacing those old infrastructures when they needed to be replaced because we've been concentrating on expanding the infrastructure and that's caused a double problem. On the one hand, we seeing leaks and breakages which cause more water to be lost and therefore we get shortages in some places because we're using more water, not not for all the new people, but also for all the new leaks.

[00:05:49]Um and this is where our municipalities really have to start catching up and spending their money more intelligently, getting the balance right between new infrastructure for new settlements and keeping the old infrastructure working properly as they should.

[00:06:05]>> All right, Professor, thank you so much for that insight. That is a former Director-General of Water and Sanitation as well as engineer, uh Professor Mike Muller, just giving us an insight in terms of the water maintenance, which is currently underway for Gauteng's metro municipalities.