City has known of need for desalination plants for years
IN TRYING to find a way to save more water, I tried to find information on portable solar-powered water desalination.
I found an article on the internet titled “Desalination for Cape Town”. You can find the article at http://www. capewatersolutions.co.za/2013/07/16/ desalination-for-cape-town/. It claims Cape Town would know “before the end of December” whether the City could build its own desalination plants.
Mayoral committee member Ernest Sonnenberg stated: “Because we are a coastal city we must look at water security. The city has now put out a tender… to get a study that will inform us of the possibility of a salt water desalination plant.”
The article was published by Aquarista on July 16, 2013. In other words, the council has known for the last four years that desalination plants were needed. Four years ago they commissioned a study to find out if it could be done. They promised solutions. They said a drought would happen again. And they did nothing.
A statement earlier this year by (I think) Xanthea Limburg stated that the council could not have anticipated this drought since there had been good rains for several years. What were they thinking? For four long years, in defiance of logic, the council has done nothing.
The council is not to blame for the drought, but they are responsible for the disastrous lack of preparedness. Anonymous
Xanthea Limberg, mayoral committee member for informal settlements, water and waste services and energy, responds:
Please note that as part of its broader efforts to ensure long-term water security, the City of Cape Town has for years been exploring alternative water supply schemes, and these investigations included desalination and groundwater extraction, among other measures.
With that being said, it is not possible to predict drought reliably, let alone anticipate the worst drought in recorded history more than four years in advance. The writer below is quoting City officials out of context.
The fact that Cape Town was exploring desalination in 2013 does not indicate that we knew desalination was an imminent requirement. At the time we anticipated a need for desalination only at some point over the next 20 to 30 years, and were undertaking exploratory studies.
Please note that the planning of new supply schemes is led by the national Department of Water and Sanitation, and takes place at regular meetings between all users of the Western Cape Water Supply System, not just the City. This planning, based on projected supply and demand, was updated in 2016 to state that a new water resource for the region would only be needed by 2021 due to the success of the City in reducing demand in previous years.
The City was also internationally recognised for its success at the 2015 C40 Cities Awards where it was acknowledged as the best in the world in terms of preparing the City for the possible challenges of climate change.
Given the long list of other urgent development and infrastructure requirements throughout the city (housing/ electrification/sanitation etc.), it is not possible to ring-fence billions of rand for new dams/desalination capacity to shield against a drought that might not happen, and as such we rather relied on restrictions to drive down demand after the first symptoms of drought were felt.
The City’s assurance of supply has been between 97% and 99%. Restrictions were implemented in a timeous manner, were well publicised, and were effective in securing essential water supply for as long as the modelling dictated was necessary, even the in the most extreme scenario.
Low rainfall has, however, persisted longer than any of the hydrological models could have anticipated.
This drought is the worst in recorded history. As a result, the City is now intensifying restrictions as well as policing thereof, and is looking to implement various temporary emergency supply schemes to cover the water deficit in the short term.
We are also now working to increase assurance of supply in the system in the long-term to protect against possible intensified drought shocks in future. Extensive pre-planning is taking place in case new large-scale permanent supply schemes have to be fast-tracked in the medium to long term.
This indicates a government that has performed well and is working hard to prepare for and respond to a new paradigm, rather than a government that has failed to make reasonable preparation.