adminmost parts of Harare this weekend as the city battles to fix three leaks on another main pipe feeding the capital from Morton Jaffray water treatment plant, a city official said yesterday.
Most of the western suburbs had no water since Friday last week when the city partially shutdown the main water plant owing to technical hitches and repairs on the other main water pipe.
Twin pipes feed Harare with water from Morton Jaffray plant.
Harare Water director Engineer Christopher Zvobgo, recently said erratic water supplies in the western suburbs had nothing to do with last week’s shutdown of the main Morton Jaffray plant.
Most residents in the city have been without water for the past six days. The situation is still critical in most suburbs.
Said Eng Zvobgo: “It takes time to recover from these shutdowns but the reason why there has been no water in areas such as Budiriro, Glen Norah, Glen View, Warren Park and others is because of hitches we are experiencing.
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“This has nothing to do with the repairs we are carrying out because we should have fully restored supplies had it not been for the technical faults.”
He said the two major pipelines the council had were old and there were bound to be disruptions in water supplies.
“We attended to five out of the eight major leaks on the two water mains from Morton Jaffray to Warren Control pump station and this weekend focus will be on the remaining three. The problem is the pipes are old and we have finished repairs on the pipe, which was restored in 1994 and we are moving to the one that was installed in 1972,” he said.
The average lifespan of such pipes is 10 years.
Asked why council was having repairs time and again instead of replacing the pipes with new ones, Eng Zvobgo said it was expensive to install new pipes. He said it costs about US$5 million to replace 50km of pipes. “We have over 5 000km, which need to be covered but each year we budget for 50km. Moreover these are 1,3m diameter pipes, which are wide and expensive. With lack of funds, we have no option but to do these things in phases but with enough money we can speed up our pipe replacement,” he said.
He said the situation was further compounded by the fact that council receives about 50 reports of water pipe bursts everyday.
Eng Zvobgo said council had to look for new sources of water if the water situation was to improve.
“We produce 600 megalitres daily against a requirement of 1 200 megalitres and that is why we always emphasise on the construction of Kunzvi and Musami dams so that we have more water sources,” he said.
Partial shutdowns have in the past resulted in water shortages for periods of up to one week after the resumption of water production and pumping to water reservoirs.
The progress in water delivery that had been recorded in the past few months was fast diminishing as millions of litres were lost through leaks.
Online Reporter