Water quality update: Affected areas to be exempted from shedding

Vusumuzi Dube, Senior Municipal Reporter

THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) has exempted areas in Old Luveve from water rationing  that have been affected by alleged contamination as the local authority continues to investigate the matter.

Last week three children reportedly died from diarrhoea complications with their families alleging that it was linked to dirty and unsafe water pumped by the city council.

According to a council report, the local authority has since exempted the affected area from the 144 hour water shedding schedule with council officials routinely taking water samples from the area for quality control testing.

The local authority revealed that preliminary investigations showed that the cause of the alleged contamination could be the obsolete infrastructure and residents’ failure to disinfect their water storage containers.

“Following numerous reports of water contamination in Old Luveve, immediately the system was exempted and flushed it.

“Information gathered from residents and data from the call center indicated that the affected area had recurrent sewer blockages, service connection leaks, hand dug wells along the outfall sewer pipe and a number of water pipe bursts,” reads part of the report.

The local authority revealed that residents who were digging open wells along the sewer line to irrigate their gardens could be failing to disinfect their containers leading to contamination when they use the same containers to store council water.

“The infrastructure is over 50 years old and has not had any water quality challenges. The 144-hour water shedding strained the already aged network further complicating the system and reducing it’s ability to self cleanse due to prolonged hours of no water to the network.

“There is a high possibility that residents where not disinfecting containers after they would have been used to draw contaminated water from open wells,” reads the report.

The local authority said while the collected samples thus far had fallen within the prescribed Standards Association of Zimbabwe levels their teams would frequently collect samples to monitor the quality.

Going forward BCC also revealed that they would fill in all illegal open wells in the suburbs.