City Power envisages repairs to a major Rand Water substation being completed by Tuesday evening while multiple “dry” suburbs across Johannesburg await a resumption of water supply. 

On Sunday Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station was affected by a power failure on City Power’s transformer, which was struck by lightning. This led to reduced water pressure and then dry taps. Further emergency repairs were needed on a feeder board on Monday night, delaying the restoration time.

The water outage is predominantly affecting residents in Soweto, Johannesburg South, Roodepoort and Randburg.

Joburg Water spokesperson Nombuso Shabalala said it was difficult to say when supply would be restored as the completion time for repairs was yet to be confirmed.

Pumping can only resume after electricity is back on, and councillor Nicole van Dyk cautioned residents: “As is often the case when Rand Water experiences these cuts, water levels take several days to build up again across the city.”

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said: “We believe we are on track to finish all the work and restore the power supply to Rand Water by this evening [Tuesday].” 

The outage has left many residents in the city fuming. 

Head of the Ferndale Ridge Residents Group Pierre van Wyk said his area has been affected since the weekend.

“You can’t bath or do laundry. It is inconvenient,” he said.

Van Wyk said City Power should do more to ensure water supply, a vital service from the metro, is not affected by outages. 

“If you look at City Power updates on X, sometimes they are not able to back feed because of an existing fault on the circuit. What that means is there is a fault and they have used the second option — the backup plan — and haven’t fixed the first option. So when the second one fails, like now, residents suffer.”

On social media, several residents questioned why the city does not have an adequate back-up system to protect water infrastructure.

Here are some of the posts:

• “So we are sitting without water for days according to this. How does this keep happening? This is an important pumping station. How is it possible that in 2024 there is no backup power?”
•  “There urgently needs to be backup solar or other power supply to stop these massive water outages from happening.”
• “Amazing. And there’s no back up system? A generator to run the pumps? Even reduced pressure is better than no water at all. Yet again a sign of total disregard of Joburg citizens.”
• “Little Falls, Roodepoort, was off for 36-hours two weeks ago (then you had the nerve to put us on load-shedding again) and now we are without water (whole of Roodepoort). Where is the urgency? Water supply should have been restored last night.”

Van Wyk said his area is fortunate as many residents have boreholes and are offering water to neighbours.

“Some people have boreholes with a filter and they filter water to use in their houses because they have gone off the grid. I have a straight borehole, which you can use to flush toilets and wash hands and dishes.”

City Power said technicians are hard at work at the substation where the power supply was lost on Monday evening due to a flash-over on one of the feeder boards.

“Teams from City Power and Rand Water worked throughout the night on repairs and restoration plans. The team managed to dismantle the damaged structure last night, and the cleaning process was completed this [Tuesday] morning,” said Mangena. 

One side of the board has tested clear. 

“We are busy testing the breakers on one side of the cleared feeder board. Should this test pass, we should be ready to restore at least 50% of the load. We will remain with the other feeder board where more work is expected, including the replacement of insulators and testing,” he said.

They were expecting the necessary materials to be delivered and, after all installations, final tests would be done to determine whether “they are ready to liven up 100% and bring all Rand Water operations back on”.

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