BWB sorry for dry taps, restores water supply

Blantyre Water Board (BWB) has apologised to its consumers in and around Blantyre City for water outages.

Queen Central Hospital, one of Malawi’s referral hospitals, is failing to carry out surgical operations due dry taps  that have hit Blantyre hard.

The commercial city has at least gone for four days without running water, forcing the referral hospital to scale down clinical operations.

BWB public affairs officer Priscilla Mateyu  said the board regret very much the discomfort it caused and  attributed the problem to a burst main supply pipe from Walker’s Ferry near Makata Industrial Area.

Mateyu said the fault was fixed by 2pm on Thursday and that supply had been restored to over half of the city.

“Our main supply pipe that distributes water to various parts of Blantyre City townships from Walker’s Ferry to Nyambadwe burst on Tuesday night and our engineers had been working on it until Thursday. It has been fixed now and all areas that had been affected will start receiving water as has been the case. Only parts of Limbe will continue experiencing the water problem due to some other issues beyond our control,” she said.

Children’s Feeding Centre, which is under the Community of Sait Igidio in Machinjiri,  also failed to provided meals to children on Thursday due water problems.

The centre provide meals to orphans and children living with HIV/AIDS and some elderly persons in the area.

“We could not keep them (children) because we are unable to prepare food for them due to water problems. We don’t have water here; water tanks are empty, no drop in there,” said one of the officials (name withheld) at the centre

Meanwhile, affected Blantyre residents have been subjected to unsafe water as they have been seen drawing water from unsafe water sources at their disposal.

The  Queens hospital and most residents rely on BWB.

Mateyu conceded that the situation has worsen further with the drying of Mudi Dam.

This, Mateyu said, has resulted in stoppage of production from Mudi treatment plant, consequently resulting in reduction of the total production capacity by 10 percent.

She also said Blantyre residents will continue to experience water shortage  until January 2015.