Warnings grow as SA’s water infrastructure nears breaking point

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JEREMY MAGGS: Severe flooding in Limpopo, deepening shortages here in Johannesburg, deteriorating dam levels in Nelson Mandela Bay and contamination risks in Knysna, all pointing to a national water infrastructure network that is under extreme and simultaneous stress.

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Risk expert Volker von Widdern from Riskonet Africa is warning that we are now entering a phase where chronic underinvestment, collapsing wastewater plants, leaks, climate volatility and failing oversight could trigger, he says, cascading failures across cities and industries.

It’s a worrying situation. Volker, a very warm welcome. You describe the water system as close to breaking. What does that mean, in your opinion, in practical terms, for households and businesses, let’s say in the next six to 12 months.

VOLKER VON WIDDERN: Well, the issue though is that it means something immediate and sudden when there’s no water in the taps or there’s no water in the bulk supply because of a major peril.

That’s the real difficulty, is there’s no visibility of what is going to happen to your water supply until the catastrophic event happens, such as no water in the pipe, or you’re notified of a major repair and you’ll be cut off for whatever period of time, or there’ll be a constraint of resources.

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I think that’s the first problem of what does it mean compared to what it could or should mean with the right understanding of the whole network, as you introduced, which is why we talk about the resource, the treatment, the distribution and consumption.

If you look at all those four segments carefully, one can do a lot better compared to the outcomes that we are facing right now.

JEREMY MAGGS: It’s extraordinary that we’re seeing flooding in Limpopo and simultaneously shortages here in Johannesburg.

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As simplistic as this question is, we’ve got to ask how a country can be hit by both too much water and too little water at the same time. It reveals something, doesn’t it, about system design and planning failure, surely.

VOLKER VON WIDDERN: Yes, and of course, climate change is a tough one to solve in a country with constrained resources like ourselves.

But climate change is not sudden. It’s been on our doorstep for the last 10 or 20 years.

The silting of dams is another issue and that is a (due to) land use and management and overgrazing and the like.

So when we think about flooding, it’s the compound effect of severe rain, which we can’t really control. But if we’re not looking after our land resources and keeping the grasses and other things in place, we will add to the flooding problem and the dams won’t manage the severe water spikes as they plan to.

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So that’s why we talk about resource to understand what is happening to the resource, what the impacts of climate change will be, why are we having silting and poor effective performance of our dams and what’s going on there?

Then through to treatment, which is the water treatment plants and making the best use of that and not further poisoning our water sources through that end. There are significant changes that can be delivered by proper analysis and respond to these things 10 or 20 years out.

JEREMY MAGGS: But not too late, one hopes. You mentioned decades of underinvestment. Who should be held accountable for, for instance, allowing wastewater plants, reservoirs, pipelines to reach this level of collapse? Again, surely better risk management a decade ago could have prevented this.

VOLKER VON WIDDERN: Well, risk management, of course, identifies the triggers. One of the key issues because of water, and we’ve noticed it with electricity, is inconsistent and non-strategic medium to long-term investment.

If you have either government departments or local authorities that have swung a large proportion of their expenditure to salaries and services and away from infrastructure maintenance and development, you will run out of infrastructure.

If you’re not paying attention to the infrastructure that you have, then that’s obviously a risk event, but it’s a strategic error in management.

So if you first don’t have the money and two, you don’t apply the money the correct way, you can call those risks or errors in management, but that’s how we’ve got here.

Then you overlay the strategic responses that we should be planning, which relate to issues like El Niño, climate change and so on. So that’s another layer of strategic intervention that we should be applying. But at the moment we’re fighting fires at the tap front instead of on the strategic front.

JEREMY MAGGS: You rightly point out that it’s difficult to manage climate change, but we can ask whether South Africa is prepared for the next extreme weather shock. The flooding in Limpopo, for instance, the Kruger Park exposing major vulnerabilities. Worst case scenario, what would happen if a similar event hit Gauteng or even Nelson Mandela Bay?

VOLKER VON WIDDERN: Well, of course we’ve seen a little bit of this … the Domoina cyclone (in 1984) got all the way into the Kruger and got far into South Africa. We saw how water levels rose 10, 20 meters and then you have an extreme problem.

The same happened with KwaZulu-Natal and we see what happens again with waterways and flood channels that are meant to be clear and let the water run but were not properly maintained and therefore the water blocked and rose too quickly and flooded the industrial plants next to the old airport.

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The first thing is understand what defences we do have and make sure that they’re effective and can deal with higher levels of precipitation. I think those levels of assessment and execution need a lot of attention right now.

Then one needs to build further protections, because the old models of the 100-year flood line and the like are no longer relevant. We have to model further into that area and say, what are we going to do about this?

Now, contrary to that, we’re developing in unplanned fashions, water management, stormwater drains are being filled with waste and so on. In fact, it looks like we’re going in the opposite direction.

JEREMY MAGGS: Just finally, as far as businesses are concerned, the private sector, you say solutions exist, but what’s the single most urgent action that they could be taking right now to mitigate?

VOLKER VON WIDDERN: Well, I think it’s a realisation that bulk water is very difficult to replace, and that the old reliance or assumption that bulk water just comes in a pipe is something that one really has to consider.

Rain harvesting and communal, in other words, business park-related storage of bulk water on site and harvested water is going to be an increasing need over time as areas of infrastructure continue to feel stress.

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Because to truck in water for an industrial facility that needs water for production, and as we’ve mentioned, it requires 10 000-odd litres to produce a pair of jeans and 15 000 litres to produce a kilogram of beef.

There’s a huge amount of water that’s needed in various production facilities and water storage on site and in commercial operations, I think, is going to be a new strategic requirement.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. Risk expert Volker von Widdern from Riskonet Africa. Volker, appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

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