MASERU – The Lesotho Highlands Development Authority (LHDA) has completed routine inspection and maintenance works following two months of planned maintenance shutdown of the water transfer and delivery tunnels.

The announcement was made on Tuesday at the LHDA headquarters in Maseru - the inspection and maintenance work was done in partnership with LHDA South African counterparts, the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority (TCTA). The inspection and maintenance were a follow-up on works undertaken in 2012.

The focus was to ensure unimpeded performance of the tunnels for sustainable operations of all electro-mechanical component of the project. LHDA Divisional Manager-Development and Operations, Reentseng Molapo, said this outage that was taken on October 1, involved the stoppage of water transfer through to South Africa and electricity generation for Lesotho at the ’Muela Hydro power station.

“The outage did not severely affect their plans in that they have met what they needed to transfer prior to the outage,” he said, adding that they were normally scheduled to deliver 780 million cubic metres of water annually. He, however, said due to the prevailing weather conditions, they had planned to deliver 700 million cubic metres of water.

Mr Molapo said they took into consideration what water levels were available in their reservoirs last year when they were planning to do the water transfer this year. He said maintenance works started from October 7 and lasted until November 15. “This, therefore, means that during this period, Lesotho did not generate its own electricity but relied on supply from both South Africa and Mozambique,” Mr Molapo said.