This morning, I brushed my teeth with half a cup of bottled water, flushed the loo with a watering can and “showered” out of a dodgy bucket that once harboured a mop.
Outside I can hear my husband anxiously tapping on the side of our Jojos and the news is not good — 20% full and Windguru predicts zero prospects of rain for the next two weeks.
I wish I could say this all arises out of my dedication to conserving our precious water resources.
I’d love to claim that the same high ideals account for my filthy car and wilting petunias.
I’d like to be able to point to a spread of succulents where once lay an evil water-sucking lawn.
Sadly, however, I cannot claim any place among the eco-warriors that valiantly fight the green cause in our neighbourhood.
The banal truth is that we’re in the grip of another water outage — currently only 12 hours but it could easily go to 24 or even 32 by past experience.
Clearly it would be deeply bourgeois and entitled to moan about this predicament if it was just an occasional inconvenience.
But 2026 has barely kicked off and already there are signs that the water interruption patterns of last year are about to reduce us to over-dosing with the deodorant.
The homegrown “data”, compiled of course by the pedantic husband in order to nag our beleaguered ward councillor, tells a rather alarming story.
Though he is a bit useless with a spreadsheet, it seems that from June to November 2025, the frustrated residents of our ‘hood endured about 18 outages, and that excluded disruptions due to planned maintenance.
Even I know that’s an average of three times per month and that my spouse has another excuse to go surfing “for personal hygiene reasons”.
To be fair, things did improve towards the end of the year but there were a few things that continued to fray my patience. First rule — never get your hopes up.
No sooner is a repair completed, then the reintroduction of water into the pipe seems to cause some kind of pressure spike which sends beautiful new fountains into the air as the water finds new points of weakness.
Second rule — most contractors and repair teams get multiple bites of the cherry and don’t seem to suffer any consequences when the same leak recurs a few days later.
Third rule — some leaks are like climate change — inexorable and highly resistant to the pathetic attempts at human resolution.
One nearby intersection has a pipe that failed so badly that it washed out the road and nearly relocated the school to the beach.
As an urban hazard, it’s so regular that Google maps may shortly flag it as a no-go route!
We moved to Cape Town in 2018 and were immediately blown away by the level of services and the way the council very evidently runs a “tight ship”. It felt like we had moved continents rather than cities.
By now you may have begun to guess that we live in one of those cash-strapped and desperately struggling municipalities that make the news for all the wrong reasons.
Blue Crane Route, Makana or maybe that creaky metro, Buffalo City.
In fact, we are now proud citizens and reluctant but compliant ratepayers of Fish Hoek in Cape Town.
The city regularly gets top marks as a water services provider and probably has more Blue Drop awards than it can warehouse.
In 2023, it was the second best Water Services Authority in the country, pipped only by the neighbouring Overstrand Municipality.
We moved to Cape Town in 2018 and were immediately blown away by the level of services and the way the council very evidently runs a “tight ship”.
It felt like we had moved continents rather than cities.
But no sooner had we begun to grudgingly give the DA its due for the extravagant boasts it makes about Cape Town, than the first enforced bucket flush started.
Coming from East London, our expectations were modest indeed.
But in two decades of living in Nahoon, I recall only a handful of water outages and even less that went beyond 24 hours.
Somehow Buffalo City bumbled along, boosting the sale of 4x4 vehicles with its potholed roads, pumping sewage onto its own beaches, but hardly ever cutting the water.
If you can take a nice cold shower on a balmy east coast summer day, you tend to ignore the fact that something bizarre has been done with the beachfront allegedly due to a dodgy contract.
I’m told that the water pipes that went into Nahoon are roughly the same vintage as those that went into Fish Hoek.
The City of Cape Town regularly gets kudos for actually maintaining and replacing water infrastructure.
The results for Fish Hoek and surrounds however, seems to be the continued appearance of new streams and springs arising from broken pipes.
Buffalo City prefers to build strange amphitheatres and water parks rather than wasting its money on old rusty pipes in bougie suburbs.
Perhaps they know something the engineers in Cape Town don’t — if you leave 50-year old pipes nestled quietly underground, they’ll be just fine but the moment they detect the vibrations of a back-hoe approaching, all hell breaks loose.
Initially it was very reassuring to find that the ward councillor is very alert to service breakdowns in our ward.
She is also backed by several community groups on social media who monitor the minutiae of all services and public works.
Strangely however, their strenuous efforts do not extend to criticism of the councillor who they clearly hold in high regard, even on the second day of no water.
Some interesting trends emerge from this council-community relationship.
Firstly, it is unreasonable to expect any projected time or date for restoration of the water service.
The good citizens are quite happy with the reassurance of “as quickly as possible”.
The City does however expand upon the timeframes for the technical steps required thus enhancing “transparency” or at least the sense thereof.
Secondly, for difficult repairs there is often a blow-by-blow account of each step from the arrival of plant and new parts, the fitting of the new pipe or joint to the backfill of the trench.
This frequently includes dramatic night video of brave teams working through the rain under a floodlight with appeals to bring food and hot drinks.
This way residents are drawn into “ownership” of the project.
Each technical challenge is “shared” with the community and God help any armchair critic who is tempted to ask “… when will it be finished”.
Thirdly, the entire dialogue — mostly via social media — is all about positivity and the great sacrifices made by the teams and everyone associated with the municipality.
On the community groups, the citizens often compete to underline this thread and quickly shoot down any “inconvenient” questions or observations that could impinge the unity that comes from tackling another water outage.
Of course, all of the above is hugely impressive and while I’d be reluctant to take my chances again with Buffalo City as my service provider, I do miss the experience of a reliable water supply.
