The people of Midros in Middelburg in the Eastern Cape have been without water for 11 days after crucial borehole pumps burnt out during load shedding on 25 June. It has taken the municipality until now to have some of the pumps fixed.

After close to two weeks of water outages caused by a load shedding-related burnout of borehole pumps, the Midros community in Middelburg began getting water out of their taps on Wednesday -- 11 days after a bout of nationwide power cuts.

The water services authority for the area is the Chris Hani Municipality -- an entity that received a rating of 35.6% for its handling of the region's drinking water in the Blue Drop Report published earlier this year.

The MEC for Cooperative Governance, Xolile Nqatha, told the provincial legislature earlier this year that only 50% of demand in the town can be met by the boreholes. Coupled with load shedding, this led to a catastrophic water failure that lasted almost two weeks.

Bulelwa Ganyaza, from the Chris Hani District Municipality, confirmed that "constant electricity outages" in the area had caused four water pumps to burn out.

This left four boreholes in the area -- Matjieskloof (two...