Amid severe water shortages, Kei Mouth locals have banded together to rejuvenate old water reservoirs while pushing for better management from the municipality to secure their future. On 26 January, the Amathole District Municipality ordered immediate and drastic water rationing for the towns of Kei Mouth and Cwili in the Eastern Cape. After brutally hot January temperatures, high festive-season consumption and below-expectation rainfall, the Cwili dam had run dry.
The municipality announced that both Kei Mouth and Cwili would have water every second day from now on, with no water at night and on Fridays. A tough blow for a town relying on tourism. “But we decided that we can point fingers, and we really want to do so, but it was not going to get us anywhere.
We moved the fight with the municipality to the sidelines and focused on the crisis at hand,” long-time Kei Mouth resident Brendon Freitag said. In 2020, the town lucked-out when Trevor Balzer, the legendary former deputy director-general responsible for strategic and emergency projects – the man who led the national drought responses for the country – chose Kei Mouth as his retirement home. Balzer, a qualified engineer and veteran in drought response, and Freitag started mobilising the town to provide their own plan for the crisis.
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Kei Mouth is one of many towns currently facing a dire water shortage due to an ongoing drought in the Eastern Cape and the Southern Cape. Knysna is facing an emergency situation, as is Nelson Mandela Bay, where the municipality has warned of rapidly dropping dam levels as extremely hot weather and dry conditions persist. Freitag, who also owns the Spar in town, was working this weekend to distribute thousands of 5-litre bottles of drinking water to every family in town and in Cwili – a donation from Spar Eastern Cape.
When the crisis measures were announced last week he said people from Kei Mouth discussed the matter and decided to see if it would be possible to clean the old town ponds.” The ponds were created around a freshwater spring to serve as reservoirs for that water, but fell out of use and became overgrown with plants and silted with mud. “Lots of us are old and fat,” Freitag laughed, but the town came together, and we cleaned out those ponds. We basically just reinstituted it.
It is far from done, but there is water that can now feed into the old reservoir from where it can be pumped,” he said. Next on their list is to see how they can fix the pump line. “The dam is dry,” he said. “We had a borehole but it got damaged through vandalism.”
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