Level 3 water restriction warning for Gauteng – what you need to know

The Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) is working with the Gauteng provincial government to encourage municipalities across the province to ramp up water restrictions, with systems already under severe strain.

Deputy President Paul Mashatile, the chairperson of the Cabinet’s “Water Task Team,” outlined this on 31 October when answering questions in the National Assembly.

Municipalities across the province, such as the Cities of Johannesburg and Tshwane, are already implementing level 1 water restrictions.

The deputy president said that these should be higher.

“As the next step from the level 1 water restrictions that are currently being implemented by municipalities, the DWS is working together with the Gauteng provincial government to encourage municipalities to put in place level 2 and level 3 water restrictions and also to enforce them,” said Mashatile.

Level 2 water restrictions, which reduce water supply by 30%, include measures like banning the watering of gardens and cleaning of driveways with hosepipe.

Level 3 water restrictions would see water supplies reduced further, with restrictions placed on how much water a person could use per day, while also cutting water-use activities even further.

Water restrictions at these levels were widely implemented in Cape Town and areas in the Western Cape during the 2016 ‘day zero’ water crisis.

We were warned

The push for tighter water restrictions comes following a slew of warnings in the country’s richest province, which is home to over 16.1 million people and contributes over a third of the country’s GDP.

In mid-October, Rand Water issued a warning over an impending water crisis, and took steps to prevent a total collapse of its networks.

“Water storage levels throughout Gauteng Province have significantly declined due to excessive water withdrawals by municipalities, raising serious concerns,” said Rand Water.

“Rand Water is left with no option but to take steps to protect its system from total collapse,” it added.

According to the utility, water supply systems in Gauteng, including Rand Water reservoirs, are critically low, and the situation is anticipated to worsen with the ongoing heat wave.

The utility said it has repeatedly warned municipalities in Gauteng about this, but “unfortunately, the crisis we sought to prevent has now materialised.”

At the end of September, Professor Anthony Turton from the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of Free State warned that the province is on the brink of a “full-blown Day Zero crisis.”

Turton explained that one of the main drivers on the demand side of the equation is the “general collapse of the water infrastructure in the various municipalities being supplied by Rand Water.”

According to government’s 2023 No Drop Report, there is a major concern in the “decline in water loss management practices, lack of metering, illegal connections, and poor infrastructure maintenance in majority of the municipalities.”

Non-revenue water (NRW) is the volume of water that is pumped but for which the municipality receives no income. The target for municipalities in South Africa is less than 25% but the actual NRW is much higher – currently ~46% in Johannesburg, ~36% in Tshwane and ~31% in Ekurhuleni.

“With losses of this magnitude, it is impossible to keep the system pressurised, so irrespective of how much Rand Water supplies, the system remains unstable,” explained Turton. 

Professor Adesola Ilemobade from the Wits School of Civil and Environmental Engineering echoed this sentiment, recently telling BusinessTech that municipalities need to improve on leakage reduction, which leads to significant waste of this scarce resource.

He said that global real or physical water losses (runs to waste) should be around 15%, but many municipalities are far exceeding this threshold.

The DWS gave Gauteng municipalities various projects to implemented to immediately to mitigate a water collapse, including fixing leaks, disconnecting illegal connections and billing residents and users correctly.

Read: R15,000 blow coming for homeowners in South Africa’s richest city