What a huge difference a year can make.
This time last year, the dams in Cape Town were sitting at 23,4% capacity. Compared with 35,7% in 2016 and a whopping 94,2% in 2014, it’s a helluva scary statistic.
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Now, thanks to recent rainfall, tighter water restrictions, and water-saving efforts from Capetonians, it looks the city’s dams are slowly but surely filling up again.
Times LIVE reports that Cape Town’s dams are on their way back to their level of three years ago:
Readings on Monday put them at 42,7%‚ just 10 percentage points lower than at this time in 2015. They increased by 4,6 percentage points in the last week…
The city’s eight minor dams are 100,3% full‚ compared with 86% a week ago.
That’s bloody brilliant, because no one wants to deal with another stockpiling scare again if these levels drop again.
This video from Times LIVE makes for decent viewing:
Even better news – if the rainfall keeps on coming and Capetonians continue to be water-wise, there’s a chance the 50-litre-a-day limit could end in the near future:
Speaking at the Water Institute of Southern Africa conference in Cape Town on Monday‚ deputy mayor Ian Neilson said the end of the 50-litre-a-day limit was near.
“While we hope at some point in the near future to be in a position to relax these restrictions‚ we cannot afford to return to our previous levels of consumption‚” he said.
However, Capetonians and the Western Cape at large aren’t out of the woods yet. The report reckons that rainfall in most catchment areas is still below the long-term average for June.
Also, Capetonians are still above the 450 million litre target, having used 527 million litres of water a day last week.
So close, and yet so far.
Don’t go running that bath just yet (or any time soon), because we’re not out of the woods.
[source:timeslive]
