Eskom’s power cuts are now not only affecting our power supply but its resulting in beaches in Cape Town being shut.
The City of Cape Town has now temporarily closed the Bakoven Beach, which is located on the Atlantic Seaboard.
The city’s deputy mayor, Eddie Andrews, said that the beach was not suitable for swimming after it picked up an electrical fault with a sewer pump station.
“The temporary closure is due to an electrical failure at the Beta pump station due to continuous load shedding. The city is looking into a solution that will prevent overflows at this pump station that is in close proximity to this small swimming area,” Andrews said.
This is the third beach that’s been affected by sewer pump station faults.
A few days ago, Muizenberg and Fish Hoek beach was re-opened after being closed for the same reason.
Andrews said that officials would test the water quality daily before opening the beach to the public.
Meanwhile, the City of Cape Town said that it was doing everything in its power to resolve the sewer pump overflows to coastal areas.
It said that the long hours of power cuts that disrupted operations at sewer pump stations was resulting in technical failures.
The city’s water and sanitation communication manager, Farouk Robertson, said that the problem would persist due to the high levels of power outages.
“Because everything is time-based, when I say time-based, it’s also depending at what volumes came in that pump station at a particular time and if it happens that four-hour period of extensive load shedding is also aligned to that same period it can have multiple effects.”
Robertson added that the city had installed alternative power supply sources at some stations to help with power outages.
“What the city has done is that, in a number of the larger sewer pump stations, we have installed back-up generators that will assist in terms of supplying power to those pumps.”
He said that the city had 400 sewer pump stations which were being monitored.
-EWN
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