Kimberley water crisis 'getting worse every year'
The Sol Plaatje Municipality in the Northern Cape says it’s racing against time to fix the 17 leaks in its water pipeline.
Kimberley’s economy has been severely impacted by the closure of several businesses due to the water crisis.
The closures have led to scores of job losses.
The city has been battling water challenges for the past five years, which have seemingly gotten worse every year.
On Monday, Sol Plaatje Municipal spokesperson Thabo Mothibi said over 2.5 billion has been allocated to deal with the upgrading of the water infrastructure in Kimberley.
“The good news is that we have an allocation of about 2.5 billion, which we received from the National Treasury called the Budget Facility for Infrastructure, which has to deal with the upgrading of the bulk water infrastructure that addresses the pipeline running from our water treatment works at Riverton which is about 70km from Kimberley”.
“The allocations that are being made have to do with what we call the emergency medium-term and long-term phases, and we are at that level of the emergency faze where we deal with matters concerning installations, repairs at our reservoirs and addressing the issue of the 17 leaks that we have on our pipeline”.
Mothibi said a complete shutdown of the water supply would be their last resort to addressing the water crisis.
“The only problem is that, while we are addressing some of these repair works, what will then happen is that we are going to have situations of certain interruptions and, to the extreme, a shutdown, but we are not looking at shutdowns as it is”.
Meanwhile, the Northern Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry has expressed concern over the closure of numerous businesses.
Restaurants and hair salons have been forced to shut down due to their inability to operate without a consistent water supply.
President of the Northern Cape Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Dudley Dally, said the water crisis has had a severe impact on businesses.
“This has been going on for the last five years, and every year has been getting progressively worse. We have had numerous shutdowns of the water, where we have no water for five, six days on-end. Therefore, you cannot operate any business with running water, and you have to use borehole water or collect water in containers.”
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