Bulawayo is facing a serious water crisis after three of its five supply dams were decommissioned due to low water levels.
Some suburbs have gone without any water for periods of up to three weeks, forcing residents to resort to using water from unprotected sources or buying water in order to beat the shortages.
The two remaining dams have failed to meet the city’s daily water requirement of 120 000 cubic metres.
The city council is only able to pump out 69 000 cubic metres of water daily from the available sources.
Bulawayo City Council spokesman Phathisa Nyathi yesterday confirmed the growing diarrhoeral cases in the city, revealing that between 300 and 400 new cases were being recorded weekly.
The situation is serious and figures from the city’s health department indicate that we have between 300 and 400 new cases of diarrhoea recorded every week. We expect the numbers to keep going up until the water supply situation improves, Nyathi told ZimOnline.
The first diarrhoea cases were recorded in the city in August after 300 people were treated for the disease. During that same period two cases of dysentery were also recorded in the city.
Although no cases of cholera had been reported so far, Nyathi said the Bulawayo city fathers were on high alert for an outbreak, particularly at institutions where there are large numbers of people.
Fortunately no cases of a cholera have been recorded in the city so far but we expect that we might soon have an outbreak in colleges, hospitals and camps where we have large numbers of people in confined areas. Cholera is a dangerous disease and we will have a big problem if we have an outbreak, Nyathi said.
He announced that the city fathers, together with the Ministry of Health and some non-governmental organisations, had embarked on an awareness campaign to deal with the diarrhoea outbreak.
We currently have a team from the health services department that is doing on-the-spot education at unprotected sources where people are drawing contaminated water while other teams visit people at the treatment centre where they teach people on the dangers of drinking unprotected water, Nyathi said.
Bulawayo and the surrounding Matabeleland region has faced perennial water problems for more than two decades but efforts to draw water from the Zambezi river have always drawn a blank as government has not committed itself to the mammoth project. – ZimOnline
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