Bulk water service provider Rand Water chairperson Advocate Matshidiso Hashatse has rubbished allegations of incompetence made by Democratic Alliance Gauteng leader Solly Msimanga.

The allegations made include poor communication ahead of planned maintenance on pipelines and failure to provide water tankers during such planned maintenance.

She avers that Rand Water, which abstracts, purifies and distributes water in bulk to its customers, has very clear communication protocols, built into the contracts of its clients, to notify well them in advance, upwards of 21 days, of any planned supply interruptions.

The customer base of Rand Water comprises metropolitans, local municipalities, industry and other small consumers.

“In addition to the provisions in these contracts, Rand Water has carefully crafted a Customer Charter in line with its values that guides Rand Water as it provides its services. The Customer Charter dictates that Rand Water issues notifications to the customers whenever supply interruptions are planned,” Hashatse said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“Rand Water has without fail, communicated to the customers whenever there are planned, or emergency, supply interruptions. In addition to the direct customer communications, Rand Water further releases media statements to this effect. This includes the currently planned maintenance programme.”

Further to accusations that Rand Water fails to provide water tankers, she said that the responsibility of reticulating water to the consumers rests with the metropolitans and municipalities.

“Therefore, Rand Water does not provide water tankers. This remains the responsibility of the metropolitans and municipalities as per agreements with our municipalities hence the issuance of 21 days’ notices to municipalities,” she clarified.

“That is why advanced notice is provided, so the municipalities can plan accordingly.”

“However, we do not just fold our hands and say it is not our legal responsibility,” she said, noting that Rand Water, on a number of occasions, assisted the City of Johannesburg with water tankers when it was requested.

Meanwhile, she said that the allegations that Rand Water has asbestos pipes that burst regularly in the network is inaccurate.

“Rand Water does not have any asbestos pipes. All the recent interruptions have had to do with plant maintenance or energy failure supply that slows down the purification and distribution of water.”

“Pipe burst and leaking pipes happen within the reticulation space commonly. That has nothing to do with Rand water, that has to do with the municipalities. These leaking pipes in the municipal space account for 40% of water losses.”

“That does not mean we do not experience outages for whatever reasons, but, by and large, in most cases, water outages are not as a result of the services that Rand Water renders in terms of bulk water. It is more localised, it is more in relation to local municipalities,” added Water and Sanitation Minister Senzo Mchunu, displaying his support for Rand Water.

Rand Water works continuously to safeguard – and augment –  its infrastructure, with plans to spend close to R25-billion in the next five years to upgrade the infrastructure to meet current and future water requirements of the municipalities.

Rand Water CEO Sipho Mosai said that Rand Water operates a 4 300-million litres of water a day system running through a 3 500 km spaghetti network and connected to 300 reservoirs and storage dams.

This equates to 2 000 Olympic size swimming pools containing 2.5-million litres of water each.

“You can not run a network as big as this without maintenance, refurbishment or replacement,” he said, noting that this is undertaken through its management strategy.

In the current financial year, Rand Water plans to spend R2.6-billion on the refurbishment, upgrading and the replacement of pipelines. In the next five years, R25-billion to R28-billion will be spent to augment the system.

“Rand Water has also committed to assisting, where possible, our municipal customers in and around Gauteng to address their high water losses of more than 40% as a result of their ageing infrastructure that includes asbestos pipes in their value chain,” Hashatse said.