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Council cuts water supplies to city
The Herald (Zimbabwe)
March 23, 2005

http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?id=41886&pubdate=2005-03-23

MOST of Harare ran dry yesterday, World Water Day, when the city council cut supplies to much of the city and its satellite towns, diverting limited inflows to empty reservoirs.

The normal problem of meeting demand in very hot weather — which has seen erratic cuts over the past month — was made worse when supplies were further restricted after serious technical problems arose at Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Plant, cutting supplies to 60 percent of normal.

A main transformer at the plant went down and the delivery valve on pump 14 ceased to function.

Although the Mayor’s Office promised that supplies would be restored at 6pm, this did not happen, and by late last night many parts of the city were still without water.

Hospitals, hotels, public toilets and many businesses went without water all day.

The crisis cuts were made soon after 7am when it was found that the city’s reservoirs held less than 30 percent of their total capacity and those with water were draining fast.

The giant reservoirs at Alexandra Park and Letombo — which hold almost 45 percent of the city’s stored water — feed most of the northern and eastern suburbs. Yesterday they were very low, meaning they had to reduce the amount they pump onward to the smaller reservoirs in the north, east and Ruwa.

Letombo was receiving limited supplies from the Prince Edward Water Works at Seke Dam, but most of the reservoirs it feeds in eastern Harare and Ruwa were empty or nearly empty.

Supplies to the southern suburbs, which are usually fed by direct reticulation from Morton Jaffray via Warren Control, were cut to divert water to the critical reservoirs.

The city centre is fed from the Alexandra Park reservoirs on Hartman Hill in the National Botanic Gardens and, thus, from a water engineering point of view, is a northern suburb.

The Herald was told cuts, or low pressure supplies, will continue between 6am and 6pm every day until supplies are closer to normal and all reservoirs have adequate quantities stored.

It is understood that the plan involves filling reservoirs during the day and letting them run down at night, in the hope that the net night outflows will be less than the daytime inflows, thus raising levels.

Under this plan, the duration of the severe disruption will depend on water use at night by city residents. If all reservoirs receive net inflows during a 24-hour period, then the council will be able to restore near normal services sooner.

There have been random cuts for more than three weeks, with the eastern suburbs and the satellite town of Ruwa, the highest parts of the distribution area, facing — as usual — the bulk of the disruption.

Harare’s peculiar geography and the resulting water reticulation scheme is responsible for the northern and eastern suburbs bearing the brunt of shortages unless special action is taken.

Harare is shaped like a tilted saucer, with the highest ground in the east and north-east and the lowest in the south-west, which is where the main treatment plant is located.

Many parts of the south-west and south of the city are not supplied from reservoirs. Treated water is pumped from Morton Jaffray to the high ground at Warren Control and then allowed to flow downhill to these areas.

The rest of the city needs supplies to be pumped from Warren Control uphill to reservoirs. But if supplies are limited, there is nothing to pump unless the gravity-fed areas are first cut off.

Yesterday afternoon, City of Harare public relations manager Mr Leslie Gwindi said the transformer installation at Morton Jaffray was in progress. The council has been accused of downplaying the severity of the water problems, especially by residents in the worst affected east, north-east and Ruwa.

"We have been experiencing water problems for the past few days, but the council has not even said a word about the situation. This has greatly affected our day-to-day life," Mr John Makore, a disgruntled Mabvuku resident, said.

So desperate is the situation in some suburbs that residents have to travel to other suburbs and surrounding rural areas to do their laundry in streams and rivers.

In a Press statement to The Herald, Harare public relations manager Mr Gwindi said they had already introduced 12-hour water cuts to northern and southern suburbs with immediate effect.

The areas to be most affected are Waterfalls, Hatfield, Greendale, Cranborne, Glen Lorne, Hillside, Eastlea, Mandara, Mabvuku and Tafara.

Supplies in these areas will be cut from 6am to 6pm daily and temporarily reconnected during the night until more water can be pumped.

"The City of Harare wishes to advise residents of Greater Harare and its satellite towns that they might experience water supply disruptions or low pressure. This is due to a technical fault we have experienced at the Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Plant.

"We are also carrying out some urgent maintenance work on one of the pumps at the plant," Mr Gwindi said.

Due to the above problems and the pump arrangement at the plant, Mr Gwindi said, the council has had to reduce pumping to the city by 60 percent.

"This will subsequently result in reduced pumping to various parts of the city and all satellite towns.

"Pumping from Letombo and Alex Park has been reduced because of low levels and we are compelled to reintroduce water demand management by cutting off supplies in all areas that have been getting supplies in the Northern and Southern suburbs from 6am to 6pm daily so as to allow subsequent pumping from Alex Park and Letombo reservoirs until the situation improves,’’ Mr Gwindi said.

He also urged residents of Harare and its satellite towns to use water sparingly while efforts to bring the situation to normalcy are in progress.

Many people in the central business district (CBD) phoned The Herald to register their displeasure with the manner the water shortages were being handled by the city council.

A snap survey revealed that most buildings in the CBD had no water at all while some had trickles or intermittent spurts because of low pressure.

"We have been experiencing low pressure at our hotel since morning and we had to use the hotel’s reservoir for our operations," said Mr Claude Chipepera the maintenance manager at Monomotapa Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Mr Chipepera said if the water cuts persist, they might be forced to close some of the hotel rooms until such a time supplies are restored.

He said efforts the hotel management had made to get the reasons for the water cuts from the council were fruitless. An official at the New Ambassador Hotel, who declined to be named, also said they were in a similarly difficult situation.

"The hotel has been experiencing water problems for the past week and we hope the situation will change for the better. We have now resorted to using water from our reservoirs," the official said.

An official at Parirenyatwa Hospital said the Mbuya Nehanda Maternity Wing experienced low pressure but the rest of the hospital complex had water.

Harare has been facing recurrent water supply problems, which have resulted in some areas going dry for days on end, a situation the local authority has attributed to the dilapidated infrastructure at the purification works which, it says, needs to be replaced at a cost the council cannot readily afford.

In February last year, Harare experienced crippling water shortages when areas such as Greendale, Eastlea, Tafara, Mabvuku and Chisipite went for as much as 10 days without supplies.

In May that same year, the Harare City Council introduced 24-hour cuts in some southern suburbs to divert flows to the north-eastern suburbs, where there had been no supplies for several days.

The areas affected included Waterfalls, Eastlea, Braeside, Chadcombe, Hillside and St Martins.

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