water towers are making a comeback, an “informative” schedule has been published

“From tomorrow, all homes will once again be connected to running water“, announced Emmanuel Macron this Friday, December 20 in Mayotte during an interview with the local press, including Mayotte the 1st. To ration the resource, water towers are making a comeback, but in much smaller slots than before: households will only have access to water for 8 hours two days out of three.

A schedule for the water towers has been communicated, but the SMAE and the Mayotte Water Union specify that “due to the instability of the network, this schedule is informative and will depend on the levels in the reservoirs“The instruction is given”to save water as much as possible until the network is restored.“The regional health agency indicates that it”water should be boiled for three minutes before consumption” to avoid any health risk.

There is also no risk that the water will always return precisely at the indicated time, until the pressure returns to the distribution network. Before the passage of the cyclone, while the water was cut off for 30 hours one day out of three, the opening and closing periods had an announced latency of two hours, between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. for outages and between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. for reopenings. These problems were particularly felt in buildings located on higher ground.

During its last update on the state of infrastructure on Thursday, December 19, the Water Union indicated that only half of the production was assured, i.e. 20,000 cubic meters of water per day compared to 40,000 usually. Four of the five water treatment plants were in operation, and almost the entire drilling system was out of service. The main difficulty then being the supply of electricity to the structures and in particular the pumping stations to distribute the water produced to the reservoirs. While waiting for a complete and stable restoration of the network, distributions of bottled water are announced in the municipalities.