Let’s reduce water usage, together

THE article “It’s official: water rationing now in place” (Cape Times, October 24) refers.

The facts are: rationing through advance pressure reduction has been ongoing for the past few weeks as part of the City’s engineered solutions to reduce pressure, lower water usage to the required levels, and therefore stretch water supplies.

Since March, the City of Cape Town has been conducting various engineering programmes in an effort to reduce water usage, including pressure management, enhanced leak repair (Cape Town is now the leading municipality in South Africa with a leak rate of 14.7% compared with the national average of 37%), and the implementation of a large-scale augmentation programme. Some weeks ago, the pressure management programme was scaled-up into an advanced pressure reduction initiative across the metro. It is not general “water cuts” across the board as reported.

If an area is trying to draw more water than what the reduced pressure can accommodate, available water will reduce to a trickle or no water for a period to some users higher up in a pressure zone (there can be more than one in an area) until the demand is reduced to match the pressure.

We will, with the help of Team Cape Town, continue to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure we not only survive this drought crisis, but thrive as a more resilient city in the future. Apart from all our City interventions, we all still need to save as much water as possible.

We thank Cape Town for helping us reduce collective water usage from 1.1 billion litres per day to below 600 million litres per day.

Together, we really have made an amazing effort. We can only reduce usage further, together. Councillor Xanthea Limberg Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services; and Energy