To help residents find quality drinking water in their area the Department of Water and Sanitation has introduced The Blue Drop system to their website.
What is The Blue Drop System?
The home page at www.dwa.gov.za is named My water – it is aimed at finding safe drinking water, as delivered by each local municipality, live. Type in your town, enter, and hey! Find out whether your tap water is safe for consumption, ie. has reached Blue Drop status.
Categories are divided as follows:
Blue Drop:
- Excellent
- Generally safe
- with microbiological failures
- with chemical failures
- Generally safe, but with inadequate monitoring
- with microbiological failures
- with chemical failures
Yellow drop:
- Non-compliant
- Non-compliant, and with inadequate monitoring
Red drop:
- Too low, with extended periods of non-compliance
How safe is the tap water in Pretoria?
Within the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, the largest of the municipalities in Gauteng, each water treatment plant has achieved individual blue-drop status. If you’re really competitive – highest honors goes to Bronkhorstbaai and Summerplace Treatment Plants.
The City of Johannesburg has the largest population and has also achieved blue-drop status. As has Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality.
The local municipalities Merafong City (administered by Rand Water), Rand West City and Mogale City also all have excellent water quality. Lesedi Local Municipality has also reached ‘excellent’ quality, while Midvaal is ‘generally safe, but with inadequate monitoring’ and Emfuleni simply does not have enough data – thus classified red.
(All data is based on March 2017 findings.)
Water (and some of our other resources too), especially clean water for consumption, is becoming more and more scarce. It’s up to you, to ensure you do everything in your power to save water, as well as keep your family safe and healthy.