The water in Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is now drinkable.
On Monday night, the entire metropolitan municipality was placed on high alert after officials established that the local water supply posed a risk to human health if consumed.
According to Joseph Tsatsire, the director of water and sanitation for Nelson Mandela Bay, they identified a high amount of E.Coli in the water through their monitoring and sampling procedure.
“This bacteria can cause detrimental health issues. We then issued an advisory so that residents can boil their water. We tried to establish the source of the contamination. We were able to track it to one of our temporary treatment works. As of today (Saturday), we had the final results and we can confirm that water is now safe to drink.”
Joseph Tsatsire
It is understood that extremely low dam levels and barren reservoirs were contributing to the dirty water spraying from the municipality’s taps. A statement issued on behalf of Nelson Mandela Bay explained that the microbiological limits used to assess water safety had been surpassed on Monday evening.
“The municipality has come to detect failures in water compliance with SANS standards. This means that, for now, the water coming out of our distribution system could present a risk to human health if ingested. The Municipality wishes to assure its residents that it’s treating this matter with the utmost urgency and seriousness.
“The current drought facing the City, with the resultant low dam levels and fluctuating reservoir levels, is one of the major contributing factors. Certain microbiological limits have now been exceeded, and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is urging all consumers to boil water before drinking it, or cooking with it.”
NMB Municipality