GEORGE NEWS - A letter from George mayor, Leon van Wyk.

The repair work flowing from the twin water pipe bursts (of both the raw water and main purified water lines) on Saturday 13 March launched a major undertaking to effect the repairs, manage water resources and communicate with the public.

The Acting Municipal Manager, Dr Michele Gratz, led from the front as teams from various directorates played their roles in managing critical aspects of the job to get repairs in place as rain also set in.

Fortunately, most of the water supply network could be restored within 60 hours. Many citizens have commented positively that the communication system worked well as they were kept aware of the progress, enabling them to plan how to sparingly use water during the crisis period.

I wish to extend my thanks to the full team involved in this exercise and to the public for their patience.

To me this incident provided a reminder of the work that the municipality's staff performs on a daily basis in dealing with the ongoing maintenance of water and sewerage networks. These repair teams often work long hours, at night or in poor weather conditions, to repair pipe bursts or deal with blocked sewers.

George operates a main water infrastructure reticulation network of 990km of pipeline and a sewer reticulation system that extends for 870km. We have a tarred road network of 428km (and a further 107km of gravel road). To place the size of our network in context, we can imagine the road to Cape Town with water and sewer lines on either side of the road and a further extension to Plettenberg Bay to cater for the gravel roads and remainder of the water line.

The George sewer system has 116 pump stations in the network to cater for the topography and 25 water pump stations. This should provide a picture of the tasks required to maintain such networks.

These networks have evolved over decades and many of them are starting to age. Bursts such as the above occur, hopefully not too often, but need to be repaired with pipe replacements that take place once sufficient evidence of regular failure has been recorded.

Maintenance is constantly done and needs to be increased, but unfortunately funding remains limited as we strive to keep water and sewerage tariffs affordable. For every 1% that we increase water and sewerage tariffs, we only add R2,5-million for this purpose.

Over the next few years we are however going to need to add five to six percent to the normal annual increases to make more headway in the refurbishment of infrastructure networks. 

The budget is undergoing structural changes that will address maintenance and refurbishment to an increasing extent from the 2021/2022 financial year.

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