Cape Town dying for rain
BAN ON USING POTABLE WATER ON GARDEN, CAR OR POOL The rains continue holding off in Cape Town and now city authorities are telling residents to prepare private stores in case of shutdown.
Cape Town has tightened water restrictions, banning the use of potable water to irrigate gardens, wash cars or top up swimming pools, as it confronts its worst drought on record and a delay to the onset of the winter rainy season.
The level of usable water in dams that supply South Africa’s second-largest city and top tourist attraction dipped below the 10% mark this week, down from 20% a year ago.
While Capetonians cut average daily summer consumption to 666 million litres from 1.1 billion litres a year ago, that’s still shy of the city’s 600-million-litre target. “To run out of usable water is to be presented with a crisis of catastrophic proportions,” Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille told the city council on Wednesday.
“We cannot be sure whether it will rain this winter. We have gone through May with nothing much to show with regard to rainfall. June might be better, but the point is we do not know.”
Besides a lack of rain, which has partly been attributed to climate change, Cape Town has had to contend with surging water demand. The population had burgeoned to 3.74 million at the time of the last census in 2011, a 45% increase from 1996, and has continued to grow steadily.
The drought also affects much of the surrounding Western Cape province.
“Our real concern is the next summer season,” said JamesBrent Styan, a spokesperson for the provincial ministry for local government, environmental affairs and development planning.
“The reason we are in this tight spot right now is because our dams weren’t full enough at the beginning of this season. Every year it is getting worse. If we don’t get a very good rainy season, we are in for a tough time.”
While the city has plans in place to augment the water sup- ply – including raising dam walls, tapping aquifers from the city’s landmark Table Mountain, reusing waste water and building a desalination plant – most of the projects may take several years to implement. In the interim, the city is considering enforcing even tighter usage restrictions within 60 days and reducing water pressure to drive down consumption to 500 million litres a day.
The city warned residents last week to store an emergency supply of drinking water in case of intermittent shutdowns.
The provincial authorities have contingency measures in place should the water supply run out to some towns, including trucking in water, according to Styan. – Bloomberg