Cape Town - The collective water savings initiatives of Cape Town's residents has pushed back Day Zero - the day the taps in Cape Town will be turned off and run dry - to July 9.
This means there are now 139 days of water left before residents will have to queue for their allocated ration of 25 litres of water per day.
The City of Cape Town said the pushing back of the date was largely due to a lower drop in water levels in the city's supply dams, as well as a reduction in average daily collective consumption to 523 million litres.
"The Groenland water transfer and the reduction in our weekly average demand has had a dramatic impact on the Day Zero date, which is determined by assuming that the fortnightly trend of weekly dam storage change will continue unchanged," deputy mayor Ian Neilson said.
"This precautionary outlook assumes no further rainfall and that water demand may not reduce over the next few months. It has been adopted to allow sufficient lead time for implementation of temporary water collection points in the event that these may be required.
"We anticipate that Day Zero could move back into June again once the Groenland transfer has been completed, unless we are able to meet the 450 MLD (million litres per day) collective water usage target. Therefore it is imperative that we reach this target to make it through to the winter rains.
"Today I urge the residents of Cape Town not to ease up on their water-saving efforts. We cannot afford to slow down when the estimated Day Zero date moves out, simply because we cannot accurately predict the volume of rainfall still to come or when it will come. Last year we had abnormally low winter rainfall, and we cannot assume that this year will be any different.
"The only way we can stretch our water supplies is to adhere to the 50 litres per person per day water allocation. Our water saving efforts across the metro have thus far been our greatest defence against Day Zero. Now is definitely not the time to ease up," Neilson said.
Dam levels were at 24.4% with Cape Town's residents still using 73 million litres more per day than the 450 million litres per day target.