(HERALD) Boost water supplies to city, satellite towns
Boost water supplies to city, satellite townsEastern and northern Harare experience frequent water cuts and often suburbs go for days without water, with no explanation, no notice and no indication of when supplies will resume. Now there has been a serious outbreak of diarrhoea diseases in the most populous and poorest suburbs of the effected area, Mabvuku and Tafara.
Unlike the better-off residents of surrounding suburbs, who can drill boreholes or use cars to collect drums of water from work or friends, the people of Mabvuku and Tafara have very limited options.
The two suburbs are built along low ridges next to a vlei holding a tributary of the Ruwa River. This makes it easy to collect stream water from the vlei and means that water tables are high enough for shallow wells.
So most do one or the other, collecting water for bathing, washing and flushing from the river or digging a shallow well. Few of these wells are protected, the cost of material for building a protective wall and cover being prohibitive. So most wells, especially when there is a lot of run-off from heavy rain, are in danger of contamination.
The people of the suburbs are aware of the dangers and do their best. They try and find Zinwa water for drinking and cooking while using the stream and well water for other purposes. But there are limits.
All it needs is one ill person contaminating the bush, and this happens, for infected water to flow into the stream or flow into wells.
Zinwa’s reaction is typical. They want wells banned. This is not helpful. With no Zinwa water people must still flush toilets and bath, if disease is not to become an even bigger menace.
The City of Harare is talking more sense. It wants boreholes drilled so that clean water can be supplied within a short walk of most homes. That will help, but not today or tomorrow.
We suggest some emergency measures. For a start, it should be possible for health workers to put a modest amount of granulated chlorine in every well and show householders how to continue doing this every few days.
The cost to the city or Zinwa or the Government will be trivial compared to the cost of medicine and nursing care for ill people.
During the liberation war a cholera outbreak in Mashonaland Central was defeated by this very method, the health workers obtaining unofficial clearance from what was coyly described as the "dominant military unit" in each area.
The legalisation or upgrading of wells can be sorted out later. The immediate goal must be to stop the spread of the outbreak.
Secondly, Zinwa needs to start thinking of Harare and its satellite towns as a single unit. Everybody can, especially with warning, go without water for 12 hours a week without much discomfort. Filling a couple of buckets and postponing the laundry is not a major undertaking.
Rotational water cuts to ensure that the available water is shared fairly seem the obvious answer if the supply is not adequate for all. After all, Zesa, for all its faults, does manage this reasonably well and with at least a degree of fairness.
Instead Zinwa keeps the northern and eastern suburbs, the areas which need at least two and often three sets of pumps to get water, perennially short and limits sharing to shuffling water around these suburbs only.
And then its sole contribution to the debate on how to solve problems is to first blame Zesa, which has set up dedicated or back-up lines to the water works and all major pump stations and no longer seems to be contributing to the shortages, and then to complain that some people desperate for water have dug a well without authority.
So far as we know, and certainly nothing has been made public, Zinwa has not even drawn up a careful stage plan to boost supplies to eastern Harare. It takes an emergency like the present one before the rest of the city even knows that something is wrong.
posted by MrK @ 1:38 AM
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