“We have no water to make a cup of tea. No water to bathe. We make fire outside the yard to make boiling water.”

Julie Fahmay, 73, a pensioner living at Chiswick Pensioner’s Flats, an old age home in Coronationville, Johannesburg, tells the story of how she and other elderly women have struggled to get water for the past three weeks due to power failures at the Eikenhof pump station. This left parts of Johannesburg and Roodepoort with little inflow or no water at all...