City’s water plan on track

We welcome the attention given to the seriousness of Cape Town’s water situation in Business Day’s editorial column but would like to correct the perception that the city’s dams might run dry by January (Parched Cape runs out of time, October 30).

Capetonians have done extremely well, bringing consumption down from 1.1-billion litres a day before restrictions to about 585-million litres per day, the lowest consumption achieved to date. The city has been working hard to drive down collective consumption towards 500million litres a day. Measures include the introduction of advanced pressure management throughout the city, stricter enforcement of existing level-five water restrictions and the installation of water-management devices at properties where demand is excessively high.

To achieve this, staff from the city’s water resilience task team are working day and night to bring additional supply into the system through desalination, groundwater abstraction and water reuse from a number of sites. The addition of new sources of nonsurface water will further reduce consumption from the dams. These new sources will start coming online in the early part of 2018.

The collective efforts of residents and the city will ensure there is sufficient water in the dams to supply the city up to March and beyond. The city is also engaging with the Department of Water and Sanitation to ensure it helps the city acquire various water licences as swiftly as possible.

As long as consumers and the city work as partners, we will not run out of water.