Many cities in Africa are facing dire times as the 2018 rainy season enters its peak. However, keen observers wonder why the well-planned cities of South Africa should be caught in this familiar web.
Reports from Pretoria say that incessant heavy rain has caused serious flooding in some parts of Cape Town and snowfall along the Cape Fold Mountains has raised the level of the city’s storage dams up to 62%. The reports described it as an increase of 1.9% in a week.
The situation has forced managers of the City of Cape Town to ask the National Department of Water and Sanitation to reduce its water restrictions from 45% to 40% for the City and from 60% to 50% for agriculture.
The managers made the proposal at a meeting with the National Department and other water users, agriculture and municipalities on Tuesday. It is that agency that decides on the amount of water that towns, cities, agriculture and industry can use, and imposes percentage cuts in times of drought. Due to the three-year drought that hit the Western Cape, the agency got agriculture to cut consumption by 60% and the Cape Coast by 45%.
The Department left it to municipalities, irrigation boards and other bodies to translate the bulk water cuts into detailed water restrictions. The water consumption level of Capetonians, which had been steadily increasing over the last three weeks, has dropped from 527 million liters a day last week to 513 million liters a day by Wednesday.
The rain station in the Jonkershoek mountains, part of the storage dams’ catchment area, had received 95mm of rain by Wednesday evening, which was about 20% of its monthly average for August. According to the reports, some of the smaller dams are full or nearly full, but of the three big dams, only the Berg River Dam is nearly full at 93% of its storage capacity.
