Water supply, storage and restrictions
Published
Water fails less often than power, but it fails harder. A venue without water cannot serve food, cannot flush a lavatory and cannot continue.
Water restrictions have been a recurring feature across South Africa, and municipal supply in parts of this province has been intermittent for reasons ranging from drought to infrastructure failure. A venue's answer to the water question tells you a great deal about how seriously it takes continuity generally.
Three kinds of supply
Municipal. Piped from the town. Convenient, and entirely dependent on a system you cannot inspect. Municipal supply is subject to restriction notices, to planned maintenance and to unplanned interruption.
Borehole. Drawn from groundwater on the property. Independent of the municipality, and generally the most resilient option — with one important caveat covered below.
Tanked or delivered. Trucked in and stored. Used as a primary supply on some remote sites and as a backup on many others. Reliable if the delivery is arranged; useless if the tank is empty on a Saturday.
Most serious venues run a combination. What you want to hear is that there is more than one source and that somebody has thought about the transition between them.
The question that connects water to power
A borehole is a pump, and a pump is an electrical load. A property on borehole water with no generator loses its water when it loses its electricity.
This is the most under-asked question at Eastern Cape venues and it is one sentence long: when the power goes, do the taps still work?
There are three good answers — the borehole pump is on the generator, there is a gravity-fed header tank that holds pressure without power, or the property is on municipal pressure. There is one bad answer, which is a pause. Ask it together with the questions in load shedding, generators and water, because they are the same question wearing two hats.
Storage is the number that matters
Any venue can say it has tanks. The useful figures are how much is stored and how long that lasts under event conditions.
Ask: what is the total stored capacity on site, how long does that supply the venue with a full wedding running, how quickly does it refill, and from what. A venue that has genuinely planned for interruption answers in hours and litres. A venue that has not talks about the tanks being large.
Then ask the second-order question: who checks the level, and when? Storage that nobody monitors is storage that turns out to be low on the day it is needed.
What a restriction actually means
A restriction notice is not usually a cut-off. It is a set of limits — on irrigation, on filling pools, sometimes on pressure — that a venue must observe.
The practical consequences for a wedding are modest but real: grounds may be browner than in the photographs you were shown, a pool may be unusable, and the venue may have rules about water use that it has to enforce with your guests. None of that ruins a wedding. Being surprised by it does.
Ask what happens under restriction, and ask whether the venue has been under one in the last two years. The answer to the second question is more informative than the answer to the first.
Kitchen and lavatories are the two hard requirements
Everything else is negotiable. These are not.
A caterer without water cannot wash, cannot prepare and, depending on the menu, cannot cook. At a remote site where the kitchen is a hired mobile operation, this is doubly important — see catering at remote and unserviced sites, where water has to be brought in deliberately rather than assumed.
Lavatories for a hundred people are a substantial water load, and a venue that runs out has an emergency rather than an inconvenience. Ask, specifically, whether lavatories and the kitchen are supplied from the same tanks and whether either has priority.
Drinking water for guests
Tap water in South African towns is generally treated and drinkable, but this varies by municipality and by the state of the local system, and guests from abroad frequently do not know what to assume.
The workable approach is to ask the venue what its position is, tell your guests plainly, and put water on the tables regardless. Bottled water at every table is cheap, and at an outdoor wedding in this climate it is not optional anyway — heat, sun and wind dehydrate guests faster than they notice. That belongs in the same bracket as shade at the ceremony position, one of the items in the twenty questions.
If you are building the site yourself
A marquee in a field, a beach ceremony or a family home hosting a large gathering all mean supplying water rather than using it. Portable lavatories, handwashing, kitchen water and drinking water each have to be specified and delivered.
Cost it honestly at the start. Water is heavy, delivery is a vehicle movement, and on a site with no hard access it is one of the reasons a field is not a cheap venue. Marquees, anchoring and the wind question covers the rest of what an empty site does not include.
The two-line version
Ask how the water arrives, ask what happens when the power stops, and ask how much is stored. Three questions, two minutes, and they distinguish a venue that has survived a bad summer from one that has not yet had one.