The Civil Engineering Contractor January 2019 | Page 24

TECHNOLOGY
Affordable fixes to
SA's poor water infra
The site of the Polihali Dam in Lesotho.
By Eamonn Ryan
The best way for other areas of South Africa to avoid the harsh measures being implemented in
the Western Cape, is to start using water more consciously through innovation.
S
outh Africa’s latest SAICE
infrastructure scorecard paints
a dismal picture as far as water
infrastructure is concerned: D+ for
bulk water resources; C+ for water
supply in major urban areas; D-
for water supply in all other areas;
C- for sanitation and wastewater
in major urban areas; and E for all
other areas. By comparison, national
roads rate B and airports a creditable
B+.
Grade E, by the way, stands for
‘unfit for purpose’ — infrastructure
that has failed; D is infrastructure
‘not coping with demand’; and C is
‘satisfactory for now’. The knee-jerk
22 | CEC January 2019
reaction is that hundreds of billions
of rand need to be spent to get
infrastructure to standard — well,
we all know we don’t have that. In
fact, lack of capital was what got us
into this latrine pit in the first place.
It is trite to simply quote the amount
of money that has to be spent —
surely there must be cheaper ways
of addressing the problem?
Fully 40% of South Africa’s
water is either lost to the system
or not paid for, while another third
of accounted-for water is lost in
the agricultural process. In “Israeli
water desalination insights” on page
28 in this issue, the Israeli Water
Authority’s head of reclaimed water,
Danny Greenwald, explains that
water efficiency is core to Israel’s
self-sufficiency, and the first step
to efficiency was achieved by Israel
ensuring water use is “both measured
and paid for” — two policy areas
South Africa is particularly weak at.
Population growth, irrigation
development, and other economic
activity mean that South Africa has
long since passed the stage where
the requirement for water can be
met from natural availability. The
solutions Israel designed to address
these issues are: an emphasis on
the decrease in the overall water
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