BY PATRICIA SIBANDA CONSTANT power outages have hampered Victoria Falls’ capacity to pump water into the resort city.
Mayor Somvelo Dlamini said council’s efforts to repair corroded pipes and pumps a few weeks back had not been helped by the intermittent power outages.
“The water supply in Victoria Falls has been restored. We were fixing pumps and rehabilitating old pumps. That has been done and pumping has resumed. (But) as I speak now, there is no power. When there is an electricity outage, it affects pumping because we use electricity to pump water,” Dlamini said.
“On our part as council, we replaced worn-out pumps and pipes. There were old pumps which were no longer functioning well, so we had to replace and put in new ones. So pumping has resumed, but power is a problem.”
He pointed out that the city needed to overhaul the entire water reticulation infrastructure because it was commissioned way back in 1972 when the population was still small.
“The city is now big and there are new developments. We came up with the water, sanitation and hygiene project to address this problem,” the mayor said, adding council had already engaged government to bring the project into fruition.
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