Cape Town has unveiled a new pump station control room, which digitally tracks the live performance of water and sanitation infrastructure.                    

The control room is already helping to improve response times for urgent infrastructure repairs by monitoring the telemetry alarm system installed across the sewer and water network to provide digital early-warnings, notes the city.

More than R7.4-million has been invested in this digital hub, with staff monitoring 401 sewer pump stations, 58 water pump stations and 60 reservoirs.

This equates to the vast majority of the city’s infrastructure network.

The system is able to directly text response teams when issues arise after hours.

“The tracking system is helping to quickly dispatch teams to attend to infrastructure performance issues,” explains City of Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.

“We have also reduced responses to false alarms by as much as 50% in the first few months of operation, ensuring more efficient use of our teams attending to faults.”

The new control room is part of a suite of interventions to bring down the impact of sewer spills on communities and the environment, says the city.

Other interventions included investing in resourcing rapid response teams and their fleets; generator and uninterruptible power supply investments to mitigate power failures across the sewer and water network; quadrupling sewer pipe replacement to around 100 km a year; doubling water pipe replacement to 50 km; and proactively jet-cleaning more than 200 km of sewers a year to mitigate blockages and overflows.

“Overall, the city will invest R5.3-billion in water and sanitation infrastructure for 2024/25 alone, more than double the first budget of the current local government term,” adds Water and Sanitation MMC Zahid Badroodien.