Cape Town: The Water and Sanitation Directorate of the City of Cape Town continues to make solid progress in addressing the backlog of trench reinstatements across the metro.
Reportedly, the City of Cape Town is steadily moving towards its goal of ensuring that no reinstatement is older than 90 days by June 2026. They will initiate this through a combination of ongoing operational improvements and a dedicated ring-fenced project.
As of now, 2,886 reinstatements have been completed city-wide since January 2025, to those who tackled through the Catch-up Project.
The directorate completed 395 trench reinstatements city-wide in September 2025. This is a 15% increase on the output of previous month. This consistent performance reflects the positive impact of the upscaling strategy of the directorate, which enables multiple work packages to be rolled out in parallel by improving turnaround times and reducing the backlog.
The City of Cape Town has appointed professional services provider under the Catch-up Project, that has reviewed 3,096 reinstatement notifications in region-04 which has the highest backlog.
Out of all these, 2,532 have been repaired, identified as duplicates or found to be created erroneously, while 564 have been assigned for completion. This leaves 4,468 of the original 7000 reinstatements still to be processed under the project.
Considering this, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Water and Sanitation – Councillor Zahid Badroodien said that the progress they are seeing is the result of deliberate planning, stronger partnerships and better coordination between teams on the ground. They are on track to get ahead of the backlog and reach the 90-day turnaround target by next winter.
The residents of Cape Town are encouraged to contact their councillor to report any reinstatement that needs to be made safe. The councillor will assist with the escalation of these through internal notification processes.
The City of Cape Town thanked the residents for their patience as teams work to restore pavements, driveways and roads safely and efficiently.