• Fluid approach

    Authorities are turning to smart technology to improve water infrastructure maintenance and prevent leaks and wastage

    Fluid approach

    ‘You cannot produce a single thing – be it a tin of beetroot or a vehicle – without water.’ With that comment, Anthony Turton, board member of the South African Water Council and former vice-president of the International Water Resources Association, distilled into a single sentence the importance of a secure water supply to a country’s economy.

    Turton was being interviewed by the Financial Times in late 2024 about the impact of Johannesburg’s current water crisis, which has seen parts of the city go without water for weeks.

    Johannesburg’s crisis has variously been attributed to the city’s booming population growth, drought and climate change, excessive use and illegal connections. While these are all important factors, it is generally agreed that ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure is the biggest contributor. Rand Water, the entity that supplies water to Gauteng, revealed last year that almost half of the water (2.5 billion litres out of 5.2 billion litres) it provides to municipalities daily is lost through leaks, old infrastructure and theft.

    Ntshaveni Mukwevho, MD of Johannesburg Water (JW), the local utility mandated to provide water and sanitation services, confirmed recently that the city has a non-revenue water (NRW) rate of 46% – NRW is water that is put into the reticulation system for which no money is recovered; in other words, it is lost to leaks and theft as well as legal free water allocations. More than a third (35%) of its NRW can be attributed to leaks alone, which works out to about 24% of water in JW’s reticulation system.

    Turton classified the crisis as an ‘existential threat’, adding that it risked ‘deindustrialising’ the entire country. Since Johannesburg is South Africa’s economic hub, contributing about 16% of its GDP, his analysis is not implausible.

    Neither is his prediction that the Eskom power cuts ‘were much easier to fix than this will be’.

    This was echoed by President Cyril Ramaphosa during an address to ANC members in January 2025. ‘Load shedding has been supplanted by the crisis of water security, which poses a similar if not greater threat to the quality of life and economic prospects of all South Africans,’ he said. He added that the water crisis is a top priority for the government in 2025.

    Ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure is one of the biggest contributors to non-revenue water in South African municipalities

    There is no denying that Johannesburg is facing an enormous challenge. ‘We need a massive focus and spending on Johannesburg’s infrastructure – 12 000 km of water pipes, 11 000 of sanitation and 87 reservoirs, and so on. JW has budgeted to fix 77.7 km of water pipes over the next five years. There are 42 reservoirs of the 87 that have leaks, so we have a long way to go,’ Ferrial Adam, who heads the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse’s WaterCAN initiative, told the JSE Quarterly magazine last year.

    Of course, Johannesburg is not the only city that is struggling with NRW. Water-management specialist Ronnie Mackenzie, told GroundUp recently that while JW is not in a good position in terms of NRW ‘there are many municipalities doing a lot worse. A good target value for water losses would be 10% to 15%. However, that can only be achieved through some serious interventions, which most towns and cities in South Africa just can’t afford’.

    In Durban, where NRW is estimated at 54%, the eThekwini municipality announced last October a year-long programme of ‘water curtailments’ to reduce water use by 8.4%. In an interview with Moneyweb at the time, Faizel Bux, director at the Institute for Water and Wastewater Technology at the Durban University of Technology, said that while water users had to make some behavioural changes with regard to using less water, the city authorities should have concentrated on fixing the leaks before starting to curtail water supply. ‘The low-hanging fruit is for us and for the municipality to address the non-revenue water rates,’ he said. ‘In my opinion, I would say that eThekwini municipality needs to address the non-revenue water issue very urgently, put resources in place, get the skilled personnel to ensure that we plug the leaks. That should be the first thing that should have been done rather than it impacting now on the end users.’

    In Makhanda in the Eastern Cape, humanitarian aid NGO Gift of the Givers was called in at the end of December to dispatch water tankers to the area, where some said they had been without water for a week.

    The mayor in the Makana Local Municipality, under which Makhanda falls, attributed the problem to leaks. ‘Makana has no problem with bulk water. The problem is infrastructure. We are faced with major leaks. Unfortunately, when we fix the leak, we will have to close water for the affected area,’ Yandiswa Vara told News24.

    Combating leaks and maintaining infrastructure appears to be at the top of the agenda for Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina, who laid down the law at the September handover of the newly upgraded James Kleynhans Water Treatment Plant to Makana.

    ‘I cannot overemphasise enough how important it is for the local municipality to ensure that the water treatment plant is well maintained. The maintenance of infrastructure is not just a nice thing to do, but an obligation by law that it should be done,’ she said.

    In Nelson Mandela Bay, authorities have introduced a leak-detection plan in a bid to halve its NRW to 20%. Under a directive from Majodina’s department, the municipality has installed generation meter adapters and district meter area meters to pinpoint areas with the highest water losses, and where intervention is needed.

    The municipality has reportedly so far repaired almost 12 500 water leaks on its network and has carried out close to 35 000 domestic repairs.

    In Johannesburg, Logan Munsamy, JW operations manager, says the utility is becoming more proactive in addressing leakages. ‘Leaks are inevitable, and our response and maintenance need to improve to fix and stop bursts. With our commitment to smart technology, we aim to prevent and detect bursts,’ he told Infrastructure News. Its new water-management strategy is focused on halving the turnaround time to fix leakages from 48 hours to 24 hours.

    After surveying its 12 000 km of water pipes towards the end of 2024, JW detected 2 396 burst pipes, 6 727 leaking meters, 442 leaking valves and 259 leaking hydrants, which translated into a saving of 25 million litres (Ml) of water a day, or almost 10 000 Ml a year. JW believes the use of smart technology could potentially save 5 Ml of water a day. Its interventions include improving pressure management and installing smart controllers to aid leak detection and ‘noise loggers’, which will enable early burst detection. Its ultimate goal is to reduce water consumption by 103 Ml a day (37 123Ml a year) through technical interventions alone, so it has a fair way to go before it sees the light at the end of the tunnel.

    However, efforts to repair leaks can also exacerbate infrastructure failure. Speaking to GroundUp, Daryl Spencer, an instrumentation engineer and water metering specialist, explains that the continuous emptying and refilling of pipelines, when parts of the system are shut down, allows air to enter the system, which causes ‘massive’ inaccuracies in water meter readings.

    ‘Most water meters have either a volumetric piston, or turbine, that rotates to measure the volumetric water consumption passing through the water meter. Air causes this device to spin uncontrollably. Consumers who have air passing through their sales meters are unfortunately being billed for air,’ he says.

    Not only that, pipes are in danger of bursting, adds McKenzie. ‘When air enters the system you get water hammer, which is basically a spike in pressure in the system. If that air doesn’t find a way out it will blow a hole in the pipe.’

    The South African government has promised an overhaul of municipal water infrastructure to remedy leaks, in addition to securing water supply

    To combat this, JW says it is replacing air-relief valves across the city and installing pressure-reducing valves. It is also testing new technologies for conventional water meters that will discount air in the system, and is considering installing electromagnetic and ultrasonic meters that remain unaffected by air in the system.

    Back in eThekwini, the municipality is using satellite- and algorithm-based technology for the early detection of leaks in its potable water pipeline.

    ‘The system is able to detect freshwater leaks in urban water supply systems by analysing multispectral images and presenting its findings on a web-based geographical information system,’ municipality spokesperson Gugu Sisilana told IOL.

    By overlaying a layer of identified leaks on a map together with streets, pipes and leak-size information, the resulting leak-detection technology can concurrently cover thousands of square kilometres.’ The leak is then confirmed using acoustic leak-detection technology.

    During his recent speech, Ramaphosa promised an overhaul of municipal water infrastructure to remedy leaks.

    He added that he was confident that by drawing ‘on the lessons learnt from dealing successfully with the seemingly intractable challenge of load shedding, we will be able to deal with this crisis’.

    The challenges that lie ahead are huge. It took 16 years to stabilise the power supply in South Africa… and the work to ameliorate the water crisis has just started.

    By Robyn Leary
    Images: iStock, Gallo/Getty Images, Freepik