NATIONAL NEWS - Cape Town’s dam levels remain very low at 20.9% on 7 May. But a closer look at the data gives the city’s residents reasons to be optimistic for 2019.
In the same week last year the dam levels were 22.4%, only 1.5 percentage points higher than now. But a key difference is that the city’s residents use a lot less water now than then. Water use last week averaged 519 million litres per day compared to well over 700 million litres daily at the same time last year.
This shows that Day Zero can be avoided in 2019 if Capetonians continue to use water frugally and the winter rainfall is not significantly lower than last year. But given how unusually low the rainfall was last year over the catchment area, it’s unlikely it will be worse this year.
