What We Found In The Water

Just want to see the articles? Click here to skip to the Our Reporting section for links to everything around this project published in News24 and Netwerk24.

Why We Test

Load shedding isn't great for drinking water. Nor is – depending on where you are – heavy rain, planting season, or a municipality that runs out of money before the end of the month.

Yet the assumption in South Africa remains that the quality of drinking water doesn't really change all that fast – even though our data suggests things can, sometimes, change dramatically from week to week. The government releases annual statistics for the quality of drinking water. Academics, and civil society, and other concerned parties, dip in from time to time but – given the enormous cost and logistical difficulties of regular testing – don't get involved often enough.

And so it is left to the very municipalities that supply drinking water to do the only day-to-day testing of what comes out of the tap. Even if we did have reason to trust them, which we generally don't, it's a pretty good idea to verify what they say.

Which is why, in the first half of 2023, News24 and Netwerk24, with funding from Truth First, a non-profit that promotes investigative journalism, set out to do just that.

What We've Found

South Africa's cities are safe from E. coli...
E. coli bacteria is highly feared in water. It can quickly cause symptoms such as stomach cramps and diarrhoea – and its presence means a major failure of water treatment. The water from our test taps have never shown any trace of E. coli.

... and from bacteria in general.
Coliform testing looks for an entire class of bacteria, many of which are not harmful to humans. Water with a high coliform count indicates trouble in treatment, with the potential for health risks. At our taps we have detected coliforms in only one sample, taken in Cape Town in late June, and that was below the level considered a health risk.

But our Cape Town site has a heterotroph red flag
A heterotrophic plate count is not a good indicator for water safety, says the World Health Organisation, but it can help diagnose aesthetic problems, and can point to the ability of water to host slime and mould as well as bacteria of all kinds.
The count is measured in colony forming units (CFU) per volume. South African standards require a CFU count of 1,000 or less.
At our Bloemfontein taps we detected some such units, but well below the acceptable range.
One of our samples in Cape Town came perilously close to that limit, at water we have sample there has consistently showed a higher count than any other city.

pH values are good in every city
The SA standard requires a pH value of between 5 and 9.7, where 7 is neutral, the point exactly between acidic and alkaline.
We have recorded pH values between 7 and 8, with only some water in Bloemfontein towards the more alkaline – and even that almost always below the 8.5 that would start being noteworthy.

Conductivity looks good across cities
Run an electrical current through water and you can see how much dissolved salt and other inorganic chemicals is in it.
South Africa requires a level of below 170 millisiemens per meter, before you get into the realm of seriously hard water.
We have detected nowhere near that at any of our taps.
Gqeberha and Bloemfontein have relatively hard water, our numbers show, but not so you'd notice.

Chlorine levels are, if anything, a little on the low side – and notably variable in Bloemfontein
The World Health Organisation is comfortable with remaining chlorine at a level of up to 5mg per litre. We have detected nowhere near that in any of our samples.
If fact, in many cities the level of chlorine is so low that storing water for a day or more could mean trouble.
Water from both of Bloemfontein's providers that we tested has proven highly variable in terms of free chlorine, which may point to inconsistency in how water is treated – but the levels are more than safe.

In Cape Town and parts of Bloemfontein we found a serious turbidity issue
Turbidity measures suspended particles, both chemical and biological, in water. High turbidity is not dangerous in itself, but it can point to all kinds of trouble, such as dirty pipes or issues with filtration at point of treatment. It also has an outsized aesthetic impact; highly turbid water looks nasty, and people may avoid it.
In SA, drinking water is required to come in at 1 or below, as measured in nephelometric turbidity units (NTU).
In our testing, only our Durban and Johannesburg taps have consistently been below that level.
In Cape Town and parts of Bloemfontein, turbidity was consistently unacceptable at our testing points, and we also found occasional trouble at our Gqeberha tap.

Our reporting

These are the articles that have appeared in News24 on this project, or featuring data we've gathered.

Other coverage

• Project co-ordinator Mia Spies speaks to RSG, 15 August 2023
• Rest assured, our water is safe! eThekwini Municipality welcomes independent report on water quality (IOL, 15 August 2023)
• Is Our Tap Water Safe To Drink? Results Are In For Water Tested Across SA Cities (2oceansvibe, 15 August 2023)
• Project co-ordinator Phillip de Wet speaks to News24 On Air, 16 August 2023
• Research finds Durban tap water safest in SA (East Coast Radio, 16 August 2023)
• Phillip de Wet speaks to 702, 17 August 2023
• Phillip de Wet speaks to Newzroom Africa, 18 August 2023

Our field team draw samples from the same area, and almost always from the same tap, every week. The taps they use are directly connected to a municipal supply; that is not always true in larger buildings and some complexes. And, as part of the sampling protocol, they wipe down those taps to reduce the chance of local contamination – which most people will not do before filling a glass of water.

Other than that, though, what they test is what you would drink, or cook with, or brush your teeth with, assuming you have no filtration system of your own.

Water quality can be affected by hyper-local factors such as the last section of pipe, so our results could conceivably differ even from samples drawn in the same suburb. Changes over time, however, are a solid indicator of how things are going at the water treatment plant.

Our funding

All project costs associated with sampling and reporting are covered by Media24, the Naspers-owned parent company shared by News24 and Netwerk24.

The cost of testing our samples is grant-funded by Truth First, a non-profit organisation created and seed-funded by former Naspers chair Ton Vosloo and his wife Anet in 2019.

Truth First has contributed to projects such as the Out of Order index on frontline delivery, and reporting on the trial of disgraced Steinhof executive Markus Jooste.