Auxilia Katongomara/Vusumuzi Dube, Chronicle Reporters
THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) has said it is failing to stick to the 72 hour weekly water shedding schedule because of power outages.
The local authority has resorted to seeking divine intervention, encouraging residents to pray for rain, as scientific solutions seem unlikely to help in the near future.
Speaking during a media tour of the city’s supply dams yesterday, the local authority’s director engineering services, Engineer Simela Dube said the city was already failing to utilise the Criterion Water Works reservoir because of negligible supplies being pumped from the supply dams compounded by power cuts.
“In the event that we have power outages we no longer can pump from the reservoir, which acts as a buffer. This explains our failure to adhere to our 72 hour water shedding schedule.
“In the meantime we can, however, not talk of extending the shedding period from 72 hours because the water we have might stretch us to the end of the year but if we don’t get any rains the situation will obviously worsen,” said Eng Dube.
He dismissed speculation that one of the causes of the water shortage was siltation in the supply dams, revealing that none of their reservoirs had evident sand in them as they mainly had rocks.
“A lot of people have asked us whether our dams have siltation, the truth is that it is very minimal. We just need rain, if you note all our off-take points are exposed. This is showing you that siltation is not really a problem.