JOHANNESBURG — The water came back to the Johannesburg suburb of Westbury at 3 a.m. on Saturday, 11 days after it stopped. Nomvula Dlamini knew because her neighbor banged on her door, and the two women spent the next hour filling every bucket, pot and bathtub in their houses before it went away again.
“The dam is full. The newspaper says the dam is full,” said Ms. Dlamini, 52, a school cook. “So where is the water? It is in the ground, under the street, where the pipe broke.”
Johannesburg, a city of 6 million built on a ridge with no major river, is in the grip of a water crisis that has little to do with rain. The Vaal Dam system that supplies the city stood at 94 percent capacity last week after a wet winter. But a third of the water that enters the city’s network never reaches a customer, lost through burst mains and leaking joints, according to Johannesburg Water, the municipal utility, and the pumps and reservoirs that lift water to the city’s high ground are failing faster than they can be repaired.
The utility reported 3,200 pipe bursts in September alone. Several of the city’s 90 reservoirs have run empty for days at a time because inflows cannot keep pace with leakage and demand, leaving the suburbs they serve dry. Hospitals have relied on tankers, and at least two schools in the southern suburbs closed for a week.
“This is what 30 years of deferred maintenance looks like,” said Prof. Sipho Mahlangu, a civil engineer at the University of the Witwatersrand who sits on an advisory panel to the utility. “Half the pipes are past their design life. You cannot fix that with a crew and a backhoe. You have to replace the city’s plumbing while people are living in it.”
The utility estimates that bringing the network to a reasonable standard would cost 27 billion rand, about $1.5 billion, over 10 years. Its capital budget this year is 1.9 billion rand. The national treasury agreed in August to an emergency grant of 3 billion rand, conditioned on the city appointing an independent board and ring-fencing water revenue, which has for years been diverted to other municipal spending.
Residents who can afford it have responded by drilling boreholes and installing tanks. Those who cannot wait for tankers that arrive on no fixed schedule. In Westbury, a working-class area west of the city center, a community group has mapped the tanker stops on a WhatsApp group and organized a rotation so the elderly do not have to carry water up the hill.
“It is the same water for everyone, but the rich have a tank and we have a bucket,” said Thabo Mokoena, 34, who runs the group. “That is the crisis. Not the pipe.”
The city has begun a pilot in which private contractors are paid per leak fixed rather than per hour, a model that reduced losses in Durban. On Monday, a crew arrived on Ms. Dlamini’s street to replace a 200-meter section of cast-iron main laid in 1961. The water, they told her, would be off for two more days.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 2 of the European edition with the headline: Johannesburg Has Water in Its Reservoirs. It Cannot Get It to the Taps..
