Water: city’s fault

THE City has led us smack into the current water crisis: you can’t drink a media campaign after all. And you would be forgiven for thinking those electronic billboards bleating along the M4 had been hacked and their messages about the grave water shortage were simply hoaxes, when parallel to the traffic runs the thick blue snake of the Liesbeek, quite high in its banks, merrily flowing out to sea.

I live in an eight-unit apartment block in Wynberg. The total water bill for that apartment block for the year ending February 2017 was R960.00. Our water bill over the past two consecutive months has been nil, and we are steadily using less water than our permitted consumption.

An exceptionally useful amount of water is being channelled away to the sea – as we all know. This is in addition to water flowing underground through to the Company’s Garden and beyond. And these subterranean waterways once supplied the Garden and fed the Long Street Baths. The neck of Queen Victoria Street is, of course, the shortest kloof in the country. And just a block up from the baths, the Little Theatre on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus uses an electric pump to keep the theatre from flooding, daily.

Good grief. And we’ve got a water crisis.

I understand that EIAs would be required to use the aquifer and indeed the streams mentioned, as well as the Liesbeek, and I welcome these assessments – but by the time these water sources reach the suburbs, if only their organic daily outputs were used by the City, I fail to see how this would negatively impact the environment upstream.

So if we’re not going to use our own water supplies – especially if now per Level 4 restrictions the City weirdly wants to attempt to restrict grey water use also – then seeing as the Vaal Dam is at 110% capacity with its sluices open, in addition to KwaZulu-Natal now experiencing flooding, will Council at least consider freighting water to Cape Town if the City will not use its own resources?

Water from Gauteng and KwaZuluNatal could be transported port to port, or via rail, at least as a pilot project – made all the more possible considering the “disaster” status Cape Town has had declared, which in turn allows greater flexibility regarding procurement.