Uis residents without water for ten days

Residents of the small settlement Uis have potable drinking water again after spending more than ten consecutive days without a drop of water from the town’s taps. Although the residents are now content with the situation, they are up in arms with the national water utility NamWater for keeping them in the dark about the extent of the crisis and why there was no water at all.
Since March this year the small settlement Uis in the Dâures constituency in the Erongo Region is plagued by a serious water crisis. Currently the residents receive drinking water three times a day and only for a few hours.
“We understand the situation is dire, but the worst is that we suddenly didn’t have any water at all and nobody informed us,” one angered resident said to namib times yesterday.
“This Thursday is the first day in exactly two weeks that water is coming out of our taps again,” said another resident, Anneline van Dyk. She runs the White Lady B+B and Camping and had it not been for her own borehole on her erf, she would not have managed the recent crisis at all. “We at least could offer brackish water to flush the toilets, but we had to place five litre water containers in the rooms so that guests could at least brush their teeth or make coffee,” she said.
Although namib times tried to get an explanation from NamWater about why there was no water for such an extended period, no answer was received from the public relations department whatsoever.
Rumours circulating in Uis indicate that although water was pumped from the Nei-Neis aquifer, situated about 30 kilometres from the settlement, the pipe leading to Uis had two major leaks. The pumped water never arrived in the reservoir which sub-sequently ran dry.
“Currently we receive water for two hours in the morning, one hour during lunch and anot-her two hours in the evening,” a resident explained. Another re-sident added: “There was a tanker that came to town where we could fill up canisters for drinking water, but it came arbitrary and on some days not at all. We couldn’t shower or flush our toilets.”
Since March this year the residents in Uis are not allowed to water their gardens, a similar situation that many towns in Namibia are currently experiencing. “My lawn is gone and most fruit trees I had are also dead now,” van Dyk continued saying. When the water tanker didn’t come to town, van Dyk had to drive to the nearby settlement Anichab, where she filled up her own water container so that she could supply her guests.
“Uis has become a desert with many gardens that disap-peared,” she concluded.