On 1 September the South African Weather Service warned that a very strong El Niño is developing, and that it could become the strongest event in living memory. The seasonal outlook for October to December points to below-normal rainfall over most of the country, with above-normal temperatures, continuing through to January.
SAWS was careful about one thing, and it is worth repeating because most coverage has dropped it: an El Niño does not automatically mean drought. The 1982/83 and 2015/16 events brought widespread drought to southern Africa. The very strong 1997/98 event brought slightly above-normal rainfall to parts of the summer rainfall region. The forecast is a loading of the dice, not a result.
So this is not a piece about an emergency. It is about what a dry season does to water infrastructure, why the damage is rarely where people expect, and why the months before the rain fails are the ones that matter.
Drought Does Not Break Infrastructure
It exposes it. That distinction matters, because it changes what you do about it.
A reservoir that was adequate at full supply becomes marginal at sixty percent. Losses you could carry when the dam was full become the difference between restriction and no water at all. A treatment works sized for a raw water quality you no longer have starts producing less than its nameplate. None of that is caused by the drought. All of it is revealed by it.
Which means the assets that fail in a dry summer are almost always the ones that were already carrying a known problem. The deferred repair, the reservoir nobody could take offline, the leak on a main that was scheduled and then rescheduled. A dry season simply removes the slack that was hiding them.
Where It Actually Shows
Four things surface, more or less in this order.
- Storage headroom. Storage is measured in days of supply, and days of supply shrink twice over in a drought — less goes in, and restrictions push demand into peaks the system was not balanced for. A scheme with one reservoir and no balancing has no margin for a pump failure on a hot Friday.
- Losses. Non-revenue water is an accounting problem in a wet year and an operational one in a dry year. Leakage that was tolerable at full supply becomes the reason a reticulation zone runs dry at the top of the hill.
- Treatment capacity at low raw-water quality. As a dam draws down, raw water gets worse: higher turbidity, more algae, changing chemistry. Coagulation demand rises, filter runs shorten, backwash frequency climbs, and the works quietly produces less than it is rated for at exactly the wrong moment.
- The repair you could not schedule. Every operator has a structure they know needs attention and cannot isolate, because taking it out of service during normal supply is not possible.
The Window Most People Miss
Here is the part that runs against instinct. The best time to work on a water-retaining structure is when it is drawn down — which is during a dry season, not after the rains return.
A reservoir you cannot inspect at full supply can be inspected at thirty percent. A floor joint you could never reach is reachable. Crack injection, joint resealing, potable-grade lining, roof repair and the watertightness test that follows all need the structure empty or near it. When the rains come back and the reservoir refills, that window closes for another year, and the defect goes back on the deferred list where it will wait for the next drought to expose it again.
The same applies to a pipeline you can shut down when demand is restricted but not when it is not, and to a treatment works where a stream can be taken offline while throughput is lower.
Every one of those is a planned, priced, scheduled piece of work. None of it is emergency work. The distinction is the whole point: emergency work on a water-retaining structure is expensive, disruptive, and done to a standard nobody is happy with.
What Unicon Actually Does Here
Bulk water is the largest part of our business and has been since the mid-nineties. Forty-nine bulk water and wastewater contracts sit in our project database, delivered for UGU District Municipality, Umgeni Water, uThukela Water, uMzinyathi District Municipality, Kokstad and Msunduzi, mostly under the GCC suite as principal contractor to a consulting engineer.
The work that a dry season creates is work we already do: reservoir refurbishment, crack injection and internal potable-grade linings, roof repair and waterproofing, joint resealing and waterstop work, new storage where the headroom is simply not there, pipeline replacement and pressure testing, pump station and abstraction works, and treatment works upgrades from inlet through to clear water.
We are not a drought response service, and we would be wary of anyone marketing themselves as one. Water-retaining structures are built and repaired on concrete discipline — mix design, placement, curing, joint detailing and testing — and that does not speed up because the forecast is bad.
If You Are Planning For This Season
The useful questions are the boring ones, and they are better asked in September than in January.
- How many days of storage does each scheme actually hold at current levels, not at full supply?
- Which structures have known defects that have been deferred because they could not be isolated?
- What can be inspected, repaired or tested at a drawdown level you are likely to reach anyway?
- Where would additional storage or a balancing reservoir remove a single point of failure?
- Is the treatment works rated for the raw water quality you will have in February, or the quality you had last March?
If the answers point to work worth doing, we are glad to look at it — drawings, a scope, or a walk of the site. And if the answer is that the asset is fine and the season is simply going to be hard, that is a legitimate answer too. It is better arrived at deliberately than discovered in February.
We would rather be the contractor you called in spring about a joint than the one you called in midsummer about a reservoir you had to drain.