‘Our water crisis worse than Cape Town’

“People are always talking about Cape Town‚ Cape Town‚ Cape Town because the mother city is a big tourist attraction but we are actually worse off.”

WERNER Knoetze‚ who lives in Port Elizabeth‚ is acutely aware how drought has affected daily life in parts of the Eastern Cape. And it’s not pretty.

Shaving and long showers are a distant memory. Neighbours snitch on each other for wasting water.

“Cape Town has other resources that they can tap into‚ we don’t. If the tap is dry‚ the tap is dry‚” he said.

Lucinda Jason‚ who runs a hair salon from home‚ has had to ask clients to wash their hair at home.

Karen Ferreira from Sage Rock Grooming dog parlour said‚ “We try to use the water as sparingly as we can. We adapt our services.”

The Nelson Mandela Bay metro municipality’s combined dam capacity was 25.17% on Thursday.

“We no longer flush for number one. You can only do it for number two. Running taps unnecessarily for brushing teeth and showering is a nono. We can’t fill up the swimming pool‚ we can’t wash the car. We use minimal water to wash the dishes and you cannot wash every single time there’s dishes. You need to let it pile up before you wash it‚” he said.

He had tried to stock up on water in case the taps run dry.

“We are actually looking at getting Jojo tanks but it never rains‚ so we cannot use that as an alternative.”

Current water restrictions made provision for 60 litres of water per person‚ per day, but the discussions about the possibility of a day zero are underway, said Nelson Mandela Bay Metro spokesman Mthubanzi Mniki.

“Desalination plants is something we will be looking into but there are serious budget implications when it comes to desalination plants.”

City of Saints water outages

In Grahamstown‚ residents are already accustomed to water interruptions.

“We have frequent water outages – for several days or several hours. It might affect one street or half the town.

“When the water comes back on‚ you generally have a lot of silt in it so the water would be brown or red‚” said resident Ron Weissenberg.

Severe threat to ecosystems

Nelson Mandela University (NMU) Professor Janine Adams said the drought posed a severe threat to the functioning of ecosystems such as estuaries and coastal wetlands.

These are naturally resilient systems if not impacted by humans. But urban development and water abstraction from wetlands has removed their natural ability to recover from droughts and illegal abstraction of freshwater has made the situation worse, she said.

“We are a semi-arid country. There are too many people for the available water resources.

“We can have engineering solutions to store water but often this does not keep up with demand.

“We need to manage what we have better and we need to use alternative water sources such as desalination and water from recycling‚” said Adams.

Desalination the only solution

Although desalination plants were expensive at first they were the only solution for some areas along the coast‚ she said.

“There is long-term planning both nationally and regionally on securing our water resources but often implementation is slow. Money is only prioritised for infrastructure development and upgrades when there is a crisis such as a drought‚” she said.

Some parts of the Eastern Cape are more vulnerable to drought due to the landscape and local weather conditions and the supply of water through modern infrastructure has also created a society that thinks less of water scarcity, say Dr Phumelele Gama from NMU.

“With issues such as changing weather patterns [eg climate change] it cannot be business as usual. Society’s mindset needs to change‚ and the way municipalities provide water also requires alternative ideas‚” she said.

Farmers under pressure

Brent McNamara‚ a management committee member of Agri Eastern Cape‚ paints a bleak picture for farmers.

“The cashflow for the farmers in the western regions is non-existent.

“They are borrowing against their commodities‚ wool‚ and mohair. They have over-extended their overdraft facilities at the banks. They have already reduced livestock drastically … even slaughtering their breeding flocks and herds‚” he said.

“Once the drought has broken‚ farmers will hold back animals to rebuild their flocks and herds resulting in fewer animals to market‚ which could make meat prices rise further,” said McNamara. — DDC