Councillor visits Brixton reservoir amid reports of service starting

Ward 87 councillor Kyle Jacobs conducted an oversight visit to the Brixton reservoir and tower on March 13 as the long-delayed infrastructure begins to come online and start supplying water to affected communities. Jacobs said the visit was prompted by reports that the newly built reservoir and tower had started feeding water into the network. He wanted to assess the situation first-hand and determine whether the project was finally beginning to address the intermittent and unreliable water supply residents have endured for years.

The visit also came shortly after another disruption last week, when a power failure at Rand Water’s Zuikerbosch water treatment plant halted pumping operations for several hours. The outage occurred on March 11 and caused supply losses across the entire Commando system. Jacobs said he wanted clarity on why the disruption had still been felt in areas expected to benefit from the new Brixton infrastructure.

During the oversight inspection, Jacobs confirmed that structural construction at both the reservoir and the tower has been completed. Water is already moving through both structures and supply has begun, though the facilities are still operating at partial capacity. At the time of the visit, the reservoir was holding just over 30% capacity, while the tower was at around 70%.

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Johannesburg Water officials told Jacobs that engineers are gradually building storage levels while simultaneously feeding water into the system. Their aim is to increase capacity over the coming weeks until the infrastructure reaches full operational levels. Jacobs also inspected the newly constructed temporary pump station at Crosby, another key component of the system upgrade.

There, he observed a pump in operation delivering approximately 400l of water per second — a significant increase in capacity. According to Jacobs, a single pump at the new station has greater pumping capacity than all the pumps from the old pump station combined. The publication sent a media query to Johannesburg Water on March 13 on the progress and clarification on the delay of Brixton Reservoir, but no comment was received at the time of publishing. The publication will send another media query to Johannesburg Water and the article will be updated once any response is received.

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