Friday, December 6 2024đ° Joburg is not the first SA city to face a serious water crisis. Most of us remember the spectre of ‘day-zero’ in Cape Town a few years back. The problems in Cape Town were largely because SA is a water-scarce country (that was drilled into us at school). The problems in Joburg are largely self-inflicted through poor maintenance and bad management.
This week Laura Grant and Gemma Ritchie ‘dive’ into some of the water issues in Johannesburg. Like most of our projects the data was collected over months and slowly assembled into a pattern. We couldn’t fit all the data into just one newsletter so we will be building some new tools to share more of it. This work is costly so please consider becoming a member to help support this work.
đ¨ This will be our second-last newsletter for 2024. We’ll be taking a few weeks off in December but we’ll be back in January with big plans, including:
- 3 new editions of our data storytelling workshop in January. Use the code ONL12 to get 10% off, and book now to avoid the January price increase.
đ° Water Watch
Joburg has a water problem. Itâs been brewing for years and it’s largely self-inflicted. The cityâs water infrastructure is old and hasnât been maintained properly, plus it hasnât been upgraded to cope with the growing population.
The people living here have stoically adapted. Much like they did during the years of loadshedding when they bought solar panels to reduce their reliance on the unreliable grid, theyâre now installing water tanks.
A day without water is worse than a day without electricity. Some of us have had desperate relatives arrive at our homes at 9pm with towels, toiletry bags and basins of dirty dishes. What can you do? Complain on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group, or take to the streets in protest like the residents of Coronationville did earlier this month? We decided to collect data.
Joburgâs water issues seem to fall into two broad categories:
- Those caused by infrastructure breakages like pipe bursts (letâs call them emergency repairs), which require âunplanned maintenanceâ, and
- Those that are wider ranging and caused by problems with reservoirs and water towers.
Joburg Water also does âplanned maintenanceâ, which includes things like cleaning reservoirs and relocating or installing new pipes. We compare this with the unplanned maintenance it reported during October and November in the chart below.
There were double the number of âunplanned maintenanceâ issues reported in the past two months than planned ones: 41 compared with 20. The unplanned maintenance affected 162 suburbs (see the map below), while planned maintenance had a daintier footprint of just over 100 suburbs. Some parts of Joburg seem to be unplanned maintenance âhotspotsâ, with suburbs within them having five or six incidents in the past two months.
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