Gwanda Mayor Jastone Mazhale says water woes in the mining town have improved following their engagement with Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority ( ZESA).
The local authority has been struggling to provide potable water to residents with officials blaming the incessant power cuts as the main reason why they have been failing to pump water to households.
Suburbs such as Jacaranda, Phakama, Spitzkop, Marriage and Ultra High were the worst affected.
The Town Clerk Priscilla Nkala once told CITE that the water challenges were beyond their control.
“Power outages are a national problem,” she said.
“When it comes to water provision all towns are affected, water levels are always low at the reservoirs hence low pressure also because some areas are at a higher altitude.
“We can put pressure on the responsible authority but some decisions are beyond our control. As it is some cannot even write critical reports due to lack of electricity.
“The issue is on our agenda and we are even applying for a dedicated line power line for the water treatment plant”,” said Nkala.
In an interview with CITE, the mayor said the water situation in the mining town has improved tremendously following fruitful engagements with ZESA.
“The water situation has improved because we lobbied ZESA to try and improve on its shedding because our problem was not water shortage but it was the water pumps that were affected by power outages,” said Cllr Mazhale.
“Our engines are powered by electricity and the moment there is load shedding, automatically there will be no supply of water.”
Cllr Mazhale said residents are no longer affected by water shedding in Gwanda as their dam levels are full.
“Water shedding in Gwanda was necessitated by power outages, the moment there is normal pumping we don’t do water-shedding, actually our dams are full,” he said.
He added that they have also worked on the terrain in Spitzkop which was making it difficult for them to pump water to the suburb.
”When it comes to Spitzkop it was not a question of ZESA or water shortages, it was a question of terrain, you will realize that the previous council 32 years ago settled people on land that was not serviced, so we had to do damage repair and came up with booster pumps to push water to those high lying areas,” said Mayor Mazhale.
“The booster pump again is affected by power outages even though it was an attempt to make sure that water is pushed to those sub serviced areas and high lying areas that were not being catered for when we planned our town.”
