Bulawayo City Council lifts water shedding

THE Bulawayo City Council has scrapped water shedding with immediate effect after the city's six supply dams received significant inflows.

In an interview yesterday, Bulawayo's Mayor Councillor Martin Kizak Moyo said an official announcement on the decision was likely to be made tomorrow.

"We have received water equal to about 10 percent of the supply dams' combined capacity in six days, from Tuesday. The dams are now about 56 percent full, compared to about 43, 1 percent when shedding commenced on 27 July 2012," said Moyo.

In the past three years, the supply dams have been getting inflows that are less than one percent of their combined capacity of 414 million cubic metres every year.
Moyo said weather forecasts were favourable and more water could flow into the dams.

Bulawayo is a perennial water shortage area that is under permanent water rationing.

At the peak of water shedding, all suburbs were going for four days without water every week.

Residents often say it is a miracle that the city was unscathed by the cholera epidemic that spread across the country in 2008.

Experts have always argued that Bulawayo is not a water shortage area. They say the city has plenty of water but the major problem was that engineers were failing to harness it.

Bulawayo's supply dams are Insiza, Inyankuni, Mtshabezi, Umzingwane, lower and Upper Ncema.

They are all situated in the drought prone Matabeleland South Province.