The eThekwini Municipality's water department undertakes repairs to a pipeline in Umhlatuzana, near Chatsworth.
Some suburbs in Durban still do not have water supplied to their taps on Thursday after a leak on a pipe from the Wiggins Treatment works high pressure supply main, but how they will know when pipe repairs are completed and reservoirs are full is a concern for eThekwini councillors.
It is for this reason that eThekwini Councillor Samier Singh put a motion through at July’s council meeting for a system to alert residents to water outages and repairs. Many councillors are overwhelmed by the number of daily calls they receive from residents regarding water supply to their taps.
In his motion, Singh said residents often experience difficulty obtaining accurate, real-time information on water outages, electricity faults and repair progress within their wards.
He said the lack of publicly accessible information undermines transparency, accountability and public confidence in municipal service delivery. He called for the eThekwini Executive Committee (Exco) to investigate and report back to council on the feasibility of developing and implementing an online public service delivery dashboard.
