Cape Town – The City of Cape Town’s Directorate for Water and Sanitation has announced that it has budgeted R55 million to expedite trench reinstatements following water infrastructure repairs over the next few months.
According to the City Department, its undertaking of water pipe replacement and maintenance at an unprecedented rate has led to higher volumes of reinstatements required where work is completed owing to a bigger budget when compared to the previous financial year.
The City’s Mayco member for water and sanitation Zahid Badrodien said to effectively tackle its mandate, a multi-prong approach would be implemented to tackle the reinstatement list, including bringing in outside contractors.
Badroodien said: “As of July 2024, we worked on approximately 3 700 trench reinstatements in the pipeline, made up of road, sidewalk, meter and driveway reinstatements, among others.
During the last financial year, the City Department set aside over R33m specifically for reinstatements handled internally. However, the hefty budget excluded the work that would be done to support the Directorate of Urban Mobility in areas such as the City Centre, South Peninsula, Constantia, and Pelican Park.
“We realised that to address the most urgent reinstatements, we needed to utilise external service providers. We are also working with the Directorate of Urban Mobility, which will assist on major mobility roads to ensure disruption to traffic flow is minimised,” Badroodien said.
“Plans are also afoot to improve the efficiency of operations and turnaround of future reinstatements.”
“Looking ahead to 2024/25, the City has significantly increased the reinstatement budget to R55m to expedite reinstatements and enhance service delivery. We apologise for the inconvenience that the need for reinstatements causes all our residents. Our teams do their best to repair pipe bursts as quickly as possible,” he said.
Badroodien also commented that the City would also be making multi-billion rand investments to replace water pipes proactively and upgrade the overall water network.
He said: “This includes doubling water pipe replacement to 50km annually. We thank our residents for their patience. Rest assured, our teams are committed to completing reinstatements as soon as possible.”
Weekend Argus