Residents had to fetch water from stagnant water streams and businesses and a clinic and a doctor’s practice were severely affected by days of water disruptions that hit parts of Buffalo City Metro last week.
Hardest hit was the once-thriving industrial township of Dimbaza, just outside King William’s Town, which saw residents’ anger boiling over onto the streets, demanding answers from authorities as to why they had been without water, just weeks after voting in the general and provincial elections.
Phola Park, Bulembu, Rayi and Noncampa villages were also affected by outages that started last Monday.
While water was restored to most areas by Saturday, Khayelitsha in Dimbaza was still without water on Sunday.
A funeral parlour owner said they could not prepare corpses for funerals properly without water, and their reputation would take a knock, costing them business.
BCM said the supply disruptions were because of a faulty electric cable supplying power to the city treatment works. While the metro said it had been carting water to residents in eight water trucks a day, Amantungwa Funeral Services owner Nombulelo Yokwana said this did not help the situation.
“We deal with corpses here and lack of water may cause a stench at our facilities. We were never told about the schedules of this disruption and now we must hire bakkies to collect water from far away.
“You must remember we use water to clean the fridges and bodies every day,” she said.
“Some families blacklist parlours because of poor service due to this problem.”
The water problems also meant the local clinic and a private practice could not operate optimally, with non-emergency cases being sent to the back of the queue.
At the Dimbaza Healthcare Centre, nurses told of how they had brought water from their homes because the carted water was murky and brownish. When the Daily Dispatch visited the normally packed clinic on Saturday, the waiting area was empty as all but emergency cases had been sent home.
Resident Miliswa John said her brother-in-law fell sick after drinking the carted water.“The water trucks did not come until Friday. The quality of this water is poor. It is only good for washing clothes and household chores, not drinking or even cooking. My brother-in-law drank some and developed cramps,” she said.Dr ARH Ramjan, assistant nurse and receptionist Sindiswa Bobo said it was hard not being able to help patients.“They came here with their blood pressure skyrocketing and we could not give them their pills to drink without water; we were helpless.“Powder medicines have to be mixed with water to work,” Bobo added.Because the metro only carted water to Dimbaza on Friday, some residents resorted to fetching the natural resource from a dam nearby. This potentially exposed them to illnesses as the stagnant water might be a health hazard.Last week, residents blocked the main road in Dimbaza with burning tyres and rubble, demanding the metro fix the problem.Asked how the situation had affected the Dimbaza clinic, provincial health spokesperson Lwandile Sicwetsha referred questions to BCM.On Saturday, BCM spokesperson Samkelo Ngwenya referred the Dispatch to Friday’s media statement, which said: “An electric cable fault supplying power to the city’s water treatment works resulted in water interruptions in the area. Officials have been working around the clock to repair the damage.”..