Impending disaster looms as persistent drought takes toll

DROUGHT looms over the Eastern Cape which is withering after only half the normal winter rain fell.

Among the hardest hit was Buffalo City, which only got a third of its winter rain, said Garth Sampson, SA Weather Services spokesman in Port Elizabeth yesterday.

“This year rainfall was between 10% and 50% lower than the winter norm across all the province’s weather stations.

“In fact East London only experienced about one-third of its usual rainfall. The first two months of winter were near record lows.”

He said the East London area received 48mm of rain this winter season, far below its average of 126mm. Mthatha and Cradock only received half their average winter rainfall, with 32mm and 12mm respectively.

Queenstown, Fort Beaufort and Bhisho were fortunate to have above average rainfall.

“The outlook for the coming months is not good either. Low rainfall can be expected until around January next year,” said Sampson.

“The weather has not helped the dam levels. In the Port Elizabeth area dams are at only 37% capacity. In the Amatola area dams are at 61.7% capacity and steadily decreasing.”

Said Sampson: “It [rainfall] has a cyclical nature. There will always be periods of scarce rainfall and then plentiful rainfall.

“Unfortunately climate change only worsens or amplifies these extreme weather conditions like drought and floods.

“Add to this a growing population and demand on scarce resources like water and things don’t look much better,” he said.

Temperatures throughout the province were above the normal winter averages by 0.5°C (maximum) and 0.2°C (minimum).

Douglas Stern, chairman of Agri EC, said: “We are heading for a disaster. We are in the third consecutive year of way below-average rainfall. It has and will impact farming and agriculture dramatically.

“We are already having to source feed for our livestock from outside the province as we simply cannot produce enough ourselves due to the persistent drought.

“We would usually be able to get this naturally from the veld but with essentially zero rain is predicted for spring so we will have to rely even more on bringing in feed from other provinces. This is a huge added cost,” said Stern.

Sampson said the only thing to do was to save as much water as possible. He advised that people try buying water tanks to store rainfall and that those who wanted to have nice gardens to put in boreholes.