Cape Town – While the average dam levels in the province have dropped to below 60%, the City of Cape Town has collective dam levels of 69.9% in its municipality.
The level of the dams which supply Cape Town declined by 1% over the past week to 70.3 % of storage capacity, compared to dam levels of 35.3% at the same time last year, the City of Cape Town said on Monday.
Last week, the City reduced its water restrictions from Level 5 to Level 3, which came into effect on Saturday.
The average water consumption decreased by 13 million litres per day to 563 million litres for the past week, which is well within the usage range.
The City encouraged water users "to continue to be water-wise and to build on the good conservation practices they adopted to beat the drought. This is in line with the thrust of Level 3 restrictions".
Ministry of Local Government James-Brent Styan told the SABC: “We note the City's idea is to give back to the people. This is achieved by the fact that the reduced restriction means that water is much cheaper.
"We just want to urge people to not use more water because there's more water available. We want to urge people to continue to use water as little as possible.”
At Level 3, the daily water usage has increased from 70 litres per person per day to 105 litres or from 500 million litres to 650 million litres of collective usage per day.
Tariffs have also been lowered to Level 3. If, for example, residents use less than 6 000 litres per month (Step 1) they can expect to pay 35.5% less.
Restrictions remain on a fairly strict recovery level as a precaution to deal with rainfall uncertainty in 2019 and 2020.
The 40% restriction on water usage applicable to businesses has been removed but the sector is strongly encouraged to continue implementing and investigating the further efficient use of water in their operations.
See the following links for information on:
– Level 3 restriction guidelines: http://bit.do/L3-guide
– Level 3 water and sanitation tariffs: http://bit.do/L3-tariffs
– Level 3 overview: http://bit.do/L3-overview
– Level 3 FAQs: http://bit.do/L3-faqs
Major dams3/12/2018Previous week% 2017Berg River95.196.264.9Steenbras Lower77.279.154.2Steenbras Upper63.162.9100.1Theewaterskloof54.855.622.8Voëlvlei90.991.926.2Wemmershoek84.986.751.4Total Stored Ml631 724640 431316 956% Storage70.371.335.3