{"id":166339,"date":"2020-09-22T01:59:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T23:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/anger-erupts-over-water-shortages-port-elizabeth\/"},"modified":"2020-09-22T01:59:08","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T23:59:08","slug":"anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages\/","title":{"rendered":"Anger erupts over PE water shortages"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Mkhuseli%20Sizani\/nmb_water-ms-20200918.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Photo of a long queue\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"2458943015\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Long queues of thirsty people formed in Missionvale, Port Elizabeth, after municipal water tankers failed to supply enough water. Photo: Mkhuseli Sizani<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People queued for hours for water in several areas of Nelson Mandela Bay on Thursday and Friday.<\/li>\n<li>A main water pipe had to be rerouted but water did not come back on when expected.<\/li>\n<li>Fed up residents in Zwide started to burn tyres in protest after waiting for four hours for water tankers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr>\n<p>Ever since Nelson Mandela Bay declared Day Zero, due to its dams running dry people have been struggling to cook, wash and drink water. Residents are furious over inadequate arrangements by the municipality. The situation was aggravated by repair work which made some people panic when water did not come back.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, Mongameli Bobani, Mayco Member for Infrastructure and Engineering, released a statement about repairs on a broken water pipe in KwaZakhele township.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWater will go off around 7am [Thursday] to enable a contractor to reroute a 450mm water main pipeline. The shutdown will affect Ibhayi, Govan Mbeki, Veeplaas, Soweto on Sea, New Brighton, KwaZakhele , Zwide and Missionvale. More water tankers will be added as and when the need arises,\u201d he had said.<\/p>\n<p>In Zwide, dozens of people with empty buckets waited on the corner of Mbane and Koyane streets from 7am on Friday. Eventually residents started to burn tyres at the traffic circle.<\/p>\n<p>Resident Pinkie Rasi said, \u201cThis is nonsense and the municipality is not even doing loud hailing to inform us when the truck is coming. We will not tolerate this forever because water is a basic need.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Friday afternoon, over 100 KwaNdokwenza residents waited more than four hours for water trucks. Resident Zuko Peter, sitting on an empty bucket while waiting, said: \u201cI have never seen a situation like this before. For the second consecutive day, our taps have run dry out of the blue \u2026 This is really frustrating and it\u2019s unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nonyameko Ganyaza, who lives in the hostel with four children, said she was panicking. She had been queueing alongside her neighbours since 8am.<\/p>\n<p>Ganyaza said, \u201cWe didn\u2019t even cook pap in the morning for the children. Clinics have no water, schools as well, and we don\u2019t even know when will the truck arrive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Thamsanqa%20Mbovane\/waterprotest-tm-20200918.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Photo of crowds of people with buckets\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"2791785751\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages-1.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Residents in Zwide, Port Elizabeth, waited more than four hours for water tankers to arrive on Friday afternoon. Photo: Thamsanqa Mbovane<\/p>\n<p>Hundreds of people in Missionvale, Smartie Town and Rolihlahla townships were furious with the municipality\u2019s failure to supply enough water tankers.<\/p>\n<p>Nokwakha Matiwane from Missionvale said, \u201cSince Thursday we have no water. At home I have ten children, including grandkids. They could not go to school because there is no water to cook porridge for them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe water tanker arrived yesterday but the water was quickly finished before we could get it. We are only helped by these dripping communal taps.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nandipha Legawe said, \u201cI have asthma and since 4am I have been queueing here wearing this dressing gown. We have to run after the water tankers and I can\u2019t. I would rather wait in this queue for this dripping tap that takes almost an hour to fill a bucket.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI won\u2019t vote because our leaders don\u2019t care about us. Why do we have to queue and push one another for water?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a media alert on Friday morning, Bobani said: \u201cThe contractor worked all night and the first end of the connection was completed around midnight. The contractors are currently busy with the second connection as there was little progress into the night and the work couldn\u2019t be completed as envisaged.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Municipal spokesperson Mamela Ndamase at 2:20pm said, \u201cThe City has completed the work that was being done and we expect that residents will have water in an hour or so. It will be low pressured but it will build up as the time progresses. By late this afternoon, we expected residents to have water fully.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis work affected all the big residential areas with a high population including Zwide and KwaZakhele, when we had a total of nine water tankers roaming around the affected areas. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank our residents for their patience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"article-copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2020 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Long queues of thirsty people formed in Missionvale, Port Elizabeth, after municipal water tankers failed to supply enough water. Photo: Mkhuseli Sizani People queued for hours for water in several areas of Nelson Mandela Bay on Thursday and Friday. A main water pipe had to be rerouted but water did not come back on when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-166339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/anger-erupts-over-pe-water-shortages.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}