Power outage forces COJ to shut down water treatment plant

Johannesburg Water reservoir

1 minute

The CEO of the South African Water Chamber, Benoit Le Roy has expressed concern that minor incidents in the water sector are escalating into major issues that the country is not well equipped to deal with.

This following a power failure at the Emfuleni substation, which provides electricity to Rand Water’s Vereeniging water treatment plant.

The outage has forced City of Johannesburg to shut down its reservoirs, leaving some residents without water.

The water systems are currently in a recovery phase.

Le Roy elaborates, “The City at the moment is having to shut off reservoirs to try and get them to fill up.

And what that does is downstream of the reservoirs, the pipes run dry and when you refill them, if you don’t bleed them adequately, which is quite a manual intensive process, you’ll end up damaging those pipes and then that system goes down.

So, the misery feeds on itself unfortunately, and there’s no quick fix like a solar panel or battery. This is quite a serious situation, unfortunately.”

Johannesburg battles water shortages