Gift of the Givers to drill boreholes at Rahima Moosa Hospital
The disaster relief group was approached by hospital staff and management requesting bottled water, portable toilets and any other practical assistance to ease its water crisis.
PRETORIA, June 02 (ANA) – Disaster relief group Gift of the Givers has undertaken to supply water to the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital in Gauteng province and help avert a water shortage crisis engulfing areas around Johannesburg.
This follows a request from hospital staff and management for bottled water, portable toilets and any practical assistance to augment daily deliveries to the institution from tankers, Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman said in a statement.
“Having delivered bottled water on 28 and 31 May, Gift of the Givers drilling teams will be arriving at the hospital shortly, having been granted permission by the management and infrastructure team to drill for water,” he said.
“Existing, defunct boreholes will be assessed with a view to resuscitate them whilst drilling for new boreholes then pumping water directly into the hospital infrastructure using booster pumps and setting up taps outside the hospital for community usage once the water has been tested and approved for human consumption.”
Sooliman said the water crisis came at the worst of times as South Africa grappled with a third wave of Covid-19 infections. Rahima Moosa is one of the feeder health centres as Johannesburg’s Charlotte Maxeke Hospital remains temporarily close.
“Health care workers trying to catch up with non-Covid conditions between the second and third wave and add to that a desperate community in the vicinity of the hospital thronging to the hospital in search of drinking water, clearly exacerbating Covid-19 risk,” said Sooliman.
He appealed for bottled water donations from companies while drilling, yield testing and laboratory water tests are being carried out.
Earlier this week an executive at utility Rand Water, which supplies the resource to Gauteng and other areas, described the failure of two transformers that left thousands of people without water over the weekend as a purely “engineering glitch”.
This affected many communities on the West Rand and parts of the vast Soweto township as well as major health institutions including Rahima Moosa and the Helen Joseph Academic Hospital.
– African News Agency (ANA), Editing by Stella Mapenzauswa