Johannesburg Water has promised to increase its response time to water leaks and pipe bursts.  This emerged at a media briefing in Newtown in Johannesburg.

The utility’s Operations Manager Logan Munsamy says infrastructure upgrades take time.

“Our short-term plan is in terms of our water restrictions. We have a water restriction schedule, which we close certain reservoirs to reduce their demand. We focused heavily in terms of our physical leak detection, so that we can repair leaks and obviously repair them accordingly, similarly with bursts.”

The entity has also announced its intention to increase water restrictions to some high demand areas in a bid to quell the ongoing water crisis.

Severe water shortages have sparked days of protests in areas including Westbury in Johannesburg.

VIDEO | Westbury residents say they have had water challenges for over five years. 

“In terms of our interventions, we’ve stepped up our game, there’s aggressive interventions that we’ve already started in places. Some of the initiatives are the permanent reduction of water supply to prepaid that’s already in place. We do that typically by throttling and closing of certain high demand areas, within that area. There’s also scheduled water restrictions, which we’ve started to implement as of 08- November 2024 which we’ve communicated quite extensively, in terms of reducing the demand. In terms of our repairs and maintenance, we have a strategy that we implemented, to improve our turnaround times from 48 hours, to 24 hours,” says Munsamy.

VIDEO | Johannesburg Water’s briefing on the state of water supply in the areas its supply.