Vusumuzi Dube
Rutendo Nyeve, Sunday News Reporter
THE Zimbabwe National Water Authority (Zinwa) has made significant progress in the rehabilitation of boreholes at the Nyamandlovu Rochester-Epping Forest Aquifer, which has seen water supplied to Bulawayo increase from three megalitres a day to 18 megalitres a day.
Over the years the water authority has struggled to pump significant water supplies to Bulawayo owing to the theft of transformers and copper cables in the area.
At the height of the vandalism in 2022, the facility which can supply Bulawayo with 20 megalitres of water per day saw more than 17 transformers being vandalised, which reduced the capacity to about three megalitres a day.
A delegation from the joint Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Sustainable Development Goals, with Bulawayo councillors recently visited the aquifer where the improvement in water pumping and supply was reported.
Zinwa Gwayi Catchment Manager Engineer Hassan Tobve revealed that they have managed to rehabilitate the boreholes with Zesa replacing the 17 transformers which had helped improve pumping.
“We were doing a phased approach in terms of our rehabilitation, buying the pumps, then installing them. Our first approach was looking at the boreholes in terms of yield. We targeted the high-yielding boreholes before moving to low-yielding boreholes.
“At the Rochester system, we are left with the boreholes that are low yielding, in terms of rehabilitation, but we are going to equip all of them. A series of other boreholes also require replacement, where some would have collapsed and we need to replace them by re-drilling them,” said Eng Tobve.
He said that at the Rochester system, they had 40 installed boreholes where 23 are operational and from the 23, Eng Tobve said six were affected by vandalism as a cable was stolen from a transformer last weekend.
“Excluding the six affected by the theft of copper cables, we now have 16 boreholes that are operational in the Rochester system. At the Epping Forest, we have an additional 20 boreholes, of which 16 are operational and four are not operational, two have collapsed. We have our most high-yielding boreholes in the Epping Forest system.
“Of those boreholes, one borehole will give you an average of 40 to 50 cubes an hour. From the two systems; we are now getting between 11 megalitres and 18 megalitres a day,” said Eng Tobve.
Sunday News visited various villagers in the area who also benefit from the facility and spoke about the improvements in pumping and the threat of vandalism.
Nyamandlovu Rochester-Epping Forest is an aquifer, a water bearing rock, which was established during the 1991 and 1992 drought season, when the country experienced a severe drought
The boreholes were drilled as an emergency measure to supply the City of Bulawayo. –@nyeve14
Online Reporter