Although Cape Town’s dams are currently sitting at 80,6 % of storage capacity, the city has urged resident to continue conserving water.

The City is still within its daily allocation of 650 million litres per day, and this is still way down from the 1.2 billion litres used per day in 2015. 

However, consumption increased to 644 million litres per day, the City said on Monday.

“After an extended period when Cape Town as a whole was exceeding our water-savings target, we are now approaching the maximum advisable level of water consumption,” said Xanthea Limberg, the mayoral committee member for water and waste.

“As such, we advise residents to keep a closer eye on consumption updates over the coming weeks and react appropriately to ensure we do not start undoing our collective good work,” she added.

A massive water-savings campaign in 2018 during a prolonged drought, saw severe restrictions introduced which resulted in consumption being limited to 50 litres per person per day. 

A “Day Zero” emergency was put in place for people to fetch water rations if tap water supplies ran out. Bucket washes and grey water reuse also became the order of the day. 

Although the City is still within safe limits of water supplies, on Monday, it cautioned that water consumption was too high and the reservoirs’ levels were dropping too quickly. 

“The reservoir levels have reduced drastically and we will run into supply issues again unless consumers reduce consumption. The system remains vulnerable until repairs to the Kaaiman’s railway bridge has been finalised,” the municipality said.