The City of Cape Town says its dam levels have increased slightly but so has water consumption.

While there has been a slight increase in dam levels of 0.5% to an overall level of 21.4% as a result of some rainfall and lower evaporation rates the City is urging resident to continue to stretch the remaining water in the City’s dams.  “We simply do not know how much rain we will receive over the winter months.”

The City’s collective consumption over the past week was 554 million litres of water per day. This was a 6.7% increase from consumption of 519 million litres last week. “It places Cape Town 104 million litres above the usage target of 450 million litres per day that the National Department of Water and Sanitation has set as a requirement,” the City notes.

Complacency setting in

“We do know that the majority of our water users are doing their best to lower usage to 50 litres per day to get to the requirement of 450 million litres, but there may be a bit of complacency creeping in.”

In addition to its internal water-saving efforts and the City’s advanced pressure management programme, which is saving approximately 52 million litres of water per day, the water resilience programme will bring more augmentation projects online over the coming months.

“However, we still do not know how much rainfall we are likely to receive over the winter season, so we simply cannot afford to relax our savings efforts,” the City concludes.