The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality warned residents on Thursday that water cuts could be on the way.
The area has an ongoing drought problem, which has worsened the city's water resource output. The municipality predicts that the city could run out of water by July this year.
NMB Mayor Retief Odendaal said the metro would then be forced to implement water shedding.
"With no significant rainfall, we might need to go on forced emergency supply for basic water. This entails cutting back residential reticulation supply and the use of collection points and Jojo tanks. This is the stark reality we are faced with," he said.
Scrolla.Africa spoke to saddened JMB residents, who said this was disappointing considering they're already facing electricity load shedding.
NMB resident Ricardo Daniels said: "We're trying to deal with load shedding and now they want to introduce water shedding? This is no way to live."
Another frustrated resident, Nomthandazo Mosi, said: "We were told to wash our hands during Covid. How are we supposed to do that now? Is the pandemic even over? It's pandemic after pandemic (referring to water and power cuts)."
A clarification of the way the water shedding plan would work comes from the Acting Executive Director of Infrastructure and Engineering, Joseph Tsatsire.
"What we are now considering is to implement what we call an emergency continuity plan, whereby we're going to cut off some of the residential consumers and actually force them to pick up water from what we call collection points or water tankers," he said.
"Obviously this is not a conventional way of providing water to our residents, but we're at a point where we only have got 230 megalitre (ML) per day from the reliable source which is Gariep [dam].
"And as we are currently consuming 286 ML per day, there is a deficit, and we cannot manage that without cutting off some of the residents from our reticulation grid."
Last week the NMB council approved R120 million to accelerate the metro's drought mitigation plans, which will include building boreholes in strategic areas in the city.
