Bulawayo Mayor, Councillor David Coltart has painted a bleak picture of the water situation in the city, which recently suspended its 120-hour water rationing regime.
Coltart took pictures of the dry Umzingwane River upstream of Umzingwane Dam, one of Bulawayo’s supply dams on Wednesday morning. He wrote on X:
The City of Bulawayo faces a major water crisis. Our dams are low and none of the rivers into them are flowing.
This morning I inspected the Umzingwane River upstream of the Umzingwane dam and these are the photos I took.
The river is bone dry – there aren’t even puddles. At this time of year, one would expect at least puddles.
Coltart urged the Government to urgently declare Bulawayo as a water shortage area to enable the local authority to mobilise funds from third-party financials. He said:
The government urgently needs to declare Bulawayo as a water shortage area and we need urgent financial assistance to take a variety of short-term remedial measures to mitigate the crisis.
These include getting the Nyamandhlovu aquifer pumps up to full capacity (and then protecting them from theft), constructing a diversionary pipeline on the Mtshabezi pipeline direct to the Umzingwane pump station, upgrading the Inyankuni dam pump station and duplicating the pipeline from Insiza dam to Ncema water purification works.
This needs to be done as a matter of extreme urgency. The BCC and local engineering companies can do all of this but we need urgent financial assistance to do so.
The City of Bulawayo recently suspended the 120-hour water rationing programme to most of the city owing to reduced pumping capacity at the Ncema Dam plant where there are ongoing maintenance works.
The local authority introduced the 120-hour water-rationing schedule in December last year due to low levels of water in the city’s supply dams.
Before the introduction of the 120-hour water-shedding regime, the city was on a 72-hour water-rationing programme.
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