Categories: Report

Understanding the UGU Water Crisis with Professor Anthony Turton

Professor Anthony Turton

Understanding the UGU Water Crisis with Professor Anthony Turton

Professor Anthony Turton

Understanding the UGU Water Crisis with Professor Anthony Turton: In my professional opinion, Ugu is on the brink of systemic collapse. The issue is complex. At present, we are receiving only 16% Service Delivery. I have been monitoring daily now for some months and have enough data to do analytics on. That 16% means that for 16 days out of 100 we receive water at the required pressure. This is an important distinction to make, because about 50% of the time we do have some water, but pressure is too low to enable delivery across a topography characterised by undulating terrain. For about 25% of the time we have no water at all. This is likely to be representative of most of the Ugu area of supply, but it will vary depending on sub-system architecture.

What is evident from the data I have captured, is that as soon as system pressure goes above 3 Bar, we can anticipate failure shortly thereafter. This pattern is now evident in the data and the more I capture, the stronger that signal is likely to be.

This being the case, it speaks to a degraded infrastructure with two possible reasons for this regular oscillation between total system crash and subsequent recovery.

Reason A is that the system is now so broken, that we have multiple points of failure, so it’s simply unable to be pressurised to anything beyond 3 Bar (as measured from my point of data capture, which is 50 metres above the pipeline at Batstone Drift). That would translate to 8 bar at Batstone.

Reason B is that deliberate sabotage is taking place, probably organised by a syndicate connected to the tender process for the procurement of tanker delivery services. This needs to be fully investigated and is beyond my capacity as an individual, but it is consistent with what is known to be happening in different jurisdictions. For example, we know of a criminal syndicate sabotaging infrastructure in a different province, and we know that this is a multi million Rand business. We also know from forensic work that has been conducted in a major metro, that the capture of the supply chain in a water service provider, has been ongoing since 2001. We can safely conclude that criminal syndicates are nested into different parts of the procurement process, in different municipalities, all harvesting revenues from degraded infrastructure.

Both these reasons are serious, demanding a precise investigation by a competent and credible authority. Unless we do this, we will continue to experience systemic failure to the point where commercial activities will cease to be viable.

I therefore place this information out there, urging a Chamber of Commerce to take this matter up as a matter of priority.

Professor Anthony Turton

Sean Lange

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Magriet says:
September 10, 2023 at 10:13 pm
The water in the taps, we are to scared to drink it, as we cannot trust it, we need to buy water to drink, we only use water from the taps to shower and washing, please confirm urgently, what can we trust and what not, we pay our bills and expect to be able to drink water from the taps, South Coast KZN Manaba