Water restriction level to stay

ALTHOUGH dam levels in the province continue to drop, the city has said it won’t be increasing the current level two water restrictions it imposed on January 1.

“We are achieving what we have aimed for, a 10 percent reduction in demand,” the city’s director for water and sanitation, Peter Flower, said yesterday.

But the council’s portfolio committee on utility services said while the city was coping with existing supply, it was seriously concerned about the plight of neighbouring municipalities.

The council said it had to do whatever it could to assist.

Mayoral committee member for utility services Ernest Sonnenberg said while the city had the capabilities to redirect water from other sources, other municipalities were not in the same position. “It’s about being neighbourly. We have to see how we can assist other municipalities.” The DA’s Clive Justus agreed. “While we have a responsibility towards our own consumers, those in

TUESDAY MARCH 8 2016 rural areas face serious problems.”

Yesterday, the weekly average for the six dams that supply Cape Town, stood at 37.4 percent, down from 38.7 percent the previous week. Flower said the Voëlvlei Dam was at the critically low level of around 22 percent.

Whereas municipalities would usually draw around 200 megalitres from the dam a day, extraction had been reduced to only around 30 megalitres.

Cape Town was not using water from this dam at all, relying instead on Theewaterskloof and Wemmershoek dams. The levels of both these dams have also dropped over the past week, to 39.8 percent and 51.9 percent, respectively.

The Freedom Front Plus’s André Fourie said he hoped the city was not being complacent about the current water situation, given its ever-growing population. “I think the situation is more serious than we think. We can’t just hope for rain.”