Water supply interruptions might be a thing of the past for Prince Mshiyeni Memorial Hospital now that the facility has a water treatment plant to ensure a reliable supply of clean water. 

In recent months, the hospital and neighbouring communities were plagued by water supply issues. 

On Thursday, KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane unveiled the R11 million water treatment plant set to mitigate water challenges at the hospital. 

According to Simelane, the hospital experienced water issues in the latter part of last year and the beginning of this year. A larger issue will arise if the large hospital, which treats about 1,500 patients every day, experiences a water issue.

“Today also marks the official opening of the hospital’s new water purification plant, which began construction on March 19, 2024,” Simelane said.

“Last time we had a problem, I said we would put in boreholes. Those are ready, but now you can’t use the water without cleaning it, hence we needed this purifier.

“Before, our steel tanks would give us water that would last about three days. Now that we’ve resuscitated the concrete reservoir, we have more storage capacity. Now we will have water that can last us at least five days if there isn’t water in the area.

“So we don’t foresee ourselves having a water problem moving forward or having a problem that will last us longer,” Simelane continued. 

“So we are very excited… if we have a problem, we can intervene and find a solution.”

KZN Department of Health project leader Thanduxolo Dlamini said they had two projects. 

The first project is a borehole project. They will use the borehole as a secondary water supply source, with the eThekwini Municipality as the main source. 

Dlamini said there are many water interruptions that hamper service delivery in terms of patient care. 

“This is how the back-up water supply project came into being. We don’t want to rely solely on municipal water. We want to have a backup water supply. So we explored or we sank four boreholes,” Dlamini said. 

He explained that the total abstraction rate from the boreholes is 620,000 litres. However, they will only abstract 560,000 litres every 16 hours, so they purify it and take it into the hospital for human consumption.

Dlamini said the second project is the concrete reservoir built the same year as the hospital. A couple of years ago, the reservoir leaked severely and lost water, so it was condemned. 

“So with these water interruptions going forward, coupled to that was Eskom’s load shedding, which the municipal pumps during load shedding don’t pump up water, there was a need for us to rehabilitate the concrete reservoir,” Dlamini explained. 

“We rehabilitated the concrete reservoir so that we can have at least a five-day water storage in case we do not receive water from the municipality. The total water storage for all three reservoirs is 5.5 megalitres. That is enough for a five-day water storage because the demand for the hospital is 1.1 megalitres per day.” 

Dlamini said vandalism was on top of safety and security concerns. He said this has occurred at least three times since the backup water storage project started in 2023. 

“It’s theft of electrical cable that is a big problem,” Dlamini said. “But we have found a way of hiding it. So I’m hoping that we will never have that.”

thobeka.ngema@inl.co.za

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