Professor Jenny Day, director of the Freshwater Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, said much has to be done to ensure that the Mother City does not dry up.

The Table [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 17 June 2011

Professor Jenny Day, director of the Freshwater Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, said much has to be done to ensure that the Mother City does not dry up.

The Table Mountain fossil aquifer has been there for millions of years. Extraction would permanently reduce the amount of water.

This could even include pumping water from under Table Mountain.

“The Table Mountain Series Aquifer stretches from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town and up to the Cederberg. We think there is an awful lot of water but we don’t know what we can exploit without causing any damage. Or how much of it would be replaced by rainfall,” she said.

The city is currently investigating this option.

Day’s views have been backed up by the Department of Water Affairs which on Monday announced that the Western Cape could face dire water shortages within the next six years.

But these shortages will not bring the city to a grinding halt if Capetonians “use water more sparingly”.

In the mid-1980s, Day co-authored Vanishing Waters, in which he predicted that, by about 2015, many of the country’s larger cities will experience permanent drought conditions.

According to the department’s latest Western Cape water supply system study, few surface water development options are available “for augmenting water supply to the City of Cape Town and surrounding towns”.

“Population growth and the subsequent growth in the economy have been identified as major factors that are placing exponential strain on the water available for users,” the department said in a statement.

“The users include the City of Cape Town, as well as municipalities of Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Swartland and Saldanha as well as agricultural users.”

But it is not all doom and gloom for the city. Millions have been invested in infrastructure upgrades and replacements, water metering and water pressure management among other measures to reduce water losses.

The city also plans next month to issue a tender for a feasibility study to build a “large scale” seawater desalination plant. And feasibility studies on a large-scale re-use programme are also on the cards.

Day said desalination, although expensive, was not far off.

“In my opinion it is going to have to happen in Cape Town not very long from now. But because it is so expensive, they have to look at other options first.”

Phil Mashoko, director of water and sanitation for the city, said it was pivotal to start planning for the future supply of water.

“There is no reason for people to panic. We are being proactive by putting plans in place now to ensure that we don’t run out of water six years from now,” Mashoko said.

Last year the city embarked on a water conservation campaign which will be intensified.

Source: Times Live
Related arcticel: Desalinated sea water for city in four years

By: John Yeld

The City of Cape Town plans to call for tenders for a feasibility study on a large-scale seawater desalination plant, as the region runs increasingly close to using all of its [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 14 June 2011

By: John Yeld

The City of Cape Town plans to call for tenders for a feasibility study on a large-scale seawater desalination plant, as the region runs increasingly close to using all of its available fresh water supply.

Water scarcity may require winter rainfall pumped from the Berg into Voelvlei Dam

The tender call, expected within a month, will be for a study on where such a desalination plant could be built and what capacity it should have.

The call coincides with a major effort to plug water leaks and theft that, in February last year, accounted for one quarter of all treated water in the city, and with a warning that few options remain for tapping existing surface water sources.

The city will also be looking at the large-scale re-use of water. This is the only potential major new water source at a cost lower than seawater desalination, which is very expensive because of the large amount of electricity required. This study is expected to kick off “within the next few months”.

These initiatives are among the water conservation and water demand management measures that form a major part of the strategy for providing water in the Western Cape region that is already using about 92 percent of all “safely” available water. “Safely” means with a high degree of certainty of availability, without water restrictions.

Depending on how successful these measures are and on how much the city grows, the remaining 8 percent of available water will be fully utilised anywhere between 2017 and 2019, according to projections by the Department of Water Affairs.

In a statement yesterday based on the latest newsletter of the Western Cape Water Resource Strategy’s steering committee, the department said it was therefore supporting the city’s efforts by calling on all residents to use water sparingly.

It pointed out that the Western Cape Water Supply System could safely provide 556 million cubic metres a year. Users of this system include the municipalities of Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Swartland and Saldanha, as well as farms.

Last year, 511 million cubic metres were used, with 32 percent going to irrigation farmers and 68 percent to urban residents.

The department pointed out that the city had invested some R60m in the current financial year to upgrade and replace water infrastructure, metering, water pressure management and other measures to reduce water loss and the amount of “non-revenue” water.

“Non-revenue” water is water that goes missing in the distribution system between the collection point and the metered outlets, as a result of pipe bursts or leaks, reservoir overflows, metering inaccuracies and theft.

“(This investment) has had the effect of reducing the average ‘lost’ water, in relation to the water treated and supplied, from 24.4 percent in February last year to 19.9 percent in February this year.”

The department said it was looking at the feasibility of two surface water options for increasing supply: pumping winter rainfall run-off water from the Berg River into Voëlvlei Dam and diverting winter rainfall above an agreed threshold from Mitchell’s Pass (Ceres) in the Dwars River-Breede catchment, to the Klein Berg River and from there through existing diversion works also into Voëlvlei.

Both options would make additional water available in the Western Cape Water Supply System and for the West Coast District Municipality.

The downstream ecological water requirements of both schemes were being determined. In terms of the National Water Act, rivers must retain sufficient water – the “ecological reserve” – to allow proper ecosystem functioning.

The department said it was also involved in a study to see whether the region’s water supplies could be augmented by the “further artificial recharge” of the Langebaan aquifer, as the city council does successfully with the Atlantis aquifer.

“A recent study by the West Coast District Municipality to augment the Langebaan Road aquifer by means of injecting surplus winter water from the Berg River into the aquifer for use during the summer months has not been as successful.

“What was thought to have been a confined aquifer unfortunately seems to be ‘punctured’ by over-abstraction and boreholes… into the lower aquifer system.

“Further studies will be done, which will include the possibility of closing off all boreholes penetrating the Lower Langebaan Road Aquifer System.”

It also stressed that the removal of invasive alien vegetation was becoming “increasingly urgent”, as water used by these plants could be much better used.

Source: IOL

The consultants and civil engineers responsible for Plett’s non-functioning desalination plant should explain why it was not working, and possibly their payment should be withheld, Bitou mayor Lulama Mvimbi said last week.

Test [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 07 April 2011

The consultants and civil engineers responsible for Plett’s non-functioning desalination plant should explain why it was not working, and possibly their payment should be withheld, Bitou mayor Lulama Mvimbi said last week.

Test intake wells are visible in the lagoon in front of the Beacon Island resort. Photo: Janine Oelofse

Asking who was to blame for the forced shutdown of the new R32-million plant less than three months after it was commissioned, Mvimbi said in the same way that council was questioned about services which clients were not satisfied with, Bitou should “also play hardball” with the contractors hired for the desalination project.

“They should sort the problems out” before they were paid, Mvimbi said. Addressing the Bitou mayoral committee, Mvimbi questioned the claim by town officials that the desalination plant was in “pilot project” phase.

“We can’t just say that,” he said, adding that the assertion suggested the R32-million had been wasted – R12-million of which had come from ratepayers and the rest from provincial government funding. Mvimbi said all the consultants and contractors would be called to a meeting with Bitou officials to explain themselves and chart a way forward.

Municipal officials earlier said the desalination plant was shut down on March 1 after the mouth of the Piesang River closed, drawing criticism from environmentalists who reminded Bitou that they had voiced their opposition to the municipality’s choice of location for the plant on the Piesang estuary.

When the plant was first mooted, Plett conservationists said they were concerned that the emergency drought regulations were being used to fast-track the project and dodge the legal requirement for an environmental impact assessment in advance.

Bitou said the shutdown became necessary after the estuary’s surface level dropped below the environmentally viable threshold.

“To avoid potential degradation of the Piesang estuary ecosystem, Bitou Municipality has elected to discontinue abstractions until specialists can be consulted and the required (retrospective) environmental monitoring systems are up to speed,” Bitou said in a statement.

The biggest problems encountered have been with the abstraction of sea water for processing by the plant.

The plant’s intake wells were moved to the Piesang estuary after Robberg Beach was found to be unsuitable, but after the river mouth closed, the abstracted water became increasingly fresh, lacking the salt levels required for the desalination process.  Bitou services and infrastructure development manager Phumla Ngqumshe said the “pilot phase monitoring” would be rerun “once the estuary levels have stabilised”.

She said a new brine recycling system would be put in place which would increase the salinity of the feed water and reduce intake from the estuary.

This approach had been chosen on environmental grounds in preference to artificial recharge of the estuary with salt water or forcing open the river mouth to facilitate tidal recharge.

Garden Route Media
By: Neil Oelofse

The government is looking at introducing a tax on mines as a way to force them to pay for the drainage of acid mine water into the water system.

Acid mine drainage seepage [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 20 March 2011

The government is looking at introducing a tax on mines as a way to force them to pay for the drainage of acid mine water into the water system.

Acid mine drainage seepage above an old abandoned underground coal mine near Witbank. Picture by: Christy van der Merwe

Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa said in Johannesburg on Saturday that even though the government had provided R400 million for clearing and cleaning derelict mines, it was not going to “keep quiet and sit back”.

“Other mines will become derelict into the future. That is when the drainage starts,” she said.

“We have decided that even though we are funding this project, we will follow up with users and operators and using Section 19 and 20 of the Water Act to try and retrieve money for them,” she said.

“We are investigating a possible environmental levy of some sort or a tax, which is money we will be able to use to clean up where a problem of this nature occurs.”

Molewa said the department was working closely with mining houses to recycle mine water.

“We are investigating whether we can use this water as grey water for industry or potable water for drinking,” she said, adding that the department was exploring a range of ways to improve the efficiency of South Africa’s water usage.

“Water recycling has become a reality to be looked at as we begin to explore other avenues with regard to water supply.”

The government, she said, was looking at the “expensive” process of desalination of sea water as an option, particularly in the drought hit coastal areas of the Western and Eastern Cape.

“I know desalination is very expensive, but in Mossel Bay, which is very dry, we have begun with a desalination project and it is proving to be successful.”

Using underground water and the harvesting of rain water were other options being looked at.

“We are looking at ways of harvesting water, when it rains,” Molewa said.

“We are consulting with the Department of Human Settlements on building houses in such a manner that they can help us harvest rain water.

“We are also looking at setting up catchment areas for rain water, so that we can capture the water so when it rains, it doesn’t flow into the ocean as quick as it does.

“I am told it takes roughly 40 minutes for rain water to flow from the top part of Eastern Cape down into the ocean,” Molewa said.

She also said her department had a plan to reconstruct the ageing sewage infrastructure in municipalities, which was causing the pollution of streams and rivers.

“We can’t look away from a potential pollution of our rivers when we know it is going to happen.

“It is a challenge that many of our municipalities have very worn out infrastructure. We are working on a plan to refurbish the infrastructure so that we can catch up on the backlog.”

- Sapa

Durban could face water restrictions as early as next year. This is the warming from eThekwini municipality water department head Neil Macleod, who said last week that recent good rains are the only reason [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 06 March 2011

Durban could face water restrictions as early as next year. This is the warming from eThekwini municipality water department head Neil Macleod, who said last week that recent good rains are the only reason restrictions have been avoided so far this year.

Rainwater Harvesting is a sustainable way of augmenting municipal supply

“The total rainfall for last year, for this region, was the fourth lowest on record. The dams at the beginning of this year were on average 20 percent lower than at the start of 2010. We typically have a series of wetter years followed by a series of dryer years. The wet years have continued for an extended period and have protected us for the statistical possibility of restrictions.

“If we’d had normal rainfall over the past three years, we would almost certainly be in the middle of water restrictions right now,” he said.

And the situation is likely to get worse. “For 2011, I do not see restrictions being introduced. But 2012 could be a different story. We are nearing the end of the summer rains and if we have a dry winter comparable to last year, then water restrictions in 2012 are almost inevitable,” he said.

Macleod’s comments come just two weeks after Professor Mike Muller, former Department of Water Affairs director-general and now commissioner of the government’s National Planning Commission, warned that South Africa will face a water crisis within the next decade.

He singled out the eThekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) and Joburg metros as the municipalities likely to first feel the shortages.

Muller told the Sunday Tribune yesterday that it is vital for cities to plan to ensure they avoided water crises.

“We need to plan and do the right things at the right time. Water is difficult because you don’t know exactly how much you have. You’re working on estimates of how much rain will fall, but it might not be the same as what you’ve estimated.

“We need to ensure not only that we have enough water now, but that we have enough if there is a drought. If that happens, we need to know we have plans in place. The national Water Affairs department has plans for all major cities, but often they are not implemented in time.

Every city needs to think about what it needs to do and whether it is doing it,” he said.

Muller said he was impressed with the efforts of Macleod’s department to reduce water losses and ensure available water was being used effectively. “Every city, when it plans, needs to look beyond building dams. They need to conserve and better use the water they’ve got,” he said.

Macleod said: “We are at a point where our dams are unable to sustain the current demand over an extended period and the risk of failure is one in 15 years – that means water rationing every 15 years, statistically.”

Adding to the problem in Durban is the amount of water lost or stolen, with the recent draft budget report for the 2011/12 financial year stating that 35 percent of the city’s water is lost or stolen through illegal connections.

Macleod said measures were in place to reduce this figure, including replacing ageing pipes and managing water pipe pressure.

But Macleod said other measures need to be considered, including building the Spring Grove Dam in the KZN Midlands and building a dam in the Umkomazi River.

Spring Grove should have been storing water five years ago, he said, “but construction work has not even started” despite an ever-growing demand for water. Macleod said even if Spring Grove was built there would still be a need for more capacity.

The other option would be to dam the Umkomazi River.

“The most recent estimate I saw put the final cost at close to R20 billion. Environmentally, the proposed site is also in a rather sensitive area.

“Continuing with traditional dam building is becoming unaffordable from both economic and environmental perspectives,” he said.

Given this, other more innovative measures are needed, including desalination of seawater and recycling water. Recycling is cheaper but has other implications.

“People don’t like the idea or want to drink recycled sewage. It has a ‘yuck’ factor. This is despite the fact that most of our water comes from heavily polluted waters, but it is the thought of recycled sewage that disturbs people. Durban’s water, for example, has Pietermaritzburg’s sewage in it. Recycling is more an emotional thing, and that’s the really big negative we’re facing,” Macleod said.

A desalination plant would cost about the same to build as a recycling plant – about R1.6bn to R2bn.

“Recycling is cheaper because the amount of impurities, and this might be surprising, are higher in seawater than sewage, making it easier to treat than seawater. Sewage plants would be inland, while the desalination plant is at sea level, so the amount you spend on pumping the treated water is less. While the capital costs are about the same, the operation costs do differ,” he said, adding they would be run by a private company, probably foreign, because of the specialist nature of the work.

Both options are being researched, but Macleod said a decision was needed urgently.

“Whatever we build, it has to be built by 2013 or 2014. We need it really soon,” he said.

Macleod encouraged ratepayers to report water theft or leaks so they can be dealt with quickly. The toll-free number is 080 131 3013.

By: Matthew Savides
Source: iol

By: Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor – Founder of Water Rhapsody.  Inventor of all the Water Rhapsody Systems.

While the fear of water restrictions work in favour of those of us who are involved in water conservation, [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 23 January 2011

By: Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor – Founder of Water Rhapsody.  Inventor of all the Water Rhapsody Systems.

While the fear of water restrictions work in favour of those of us who are involved in water conservation, it would be preferable for all of us to have smoothed restrictions rather than an all or nothing scenario.  All of us mean the population at large, the municipality, the Department of Environmental Affairs as well as Water Rhapsody. Please let me explain…

Although the upper Steenbras is almost full the majority of this water is stored for electricity power generation

Cycle of drought

Six, seven years or perhaps even eight years may elapse between one and the next season of drought.  These years between drought cycles are winter months in Cape Town of higher than average rainfall, and the reverse in the northern regions of South Africa where we get summer rains. During these years of higher than average rainfall, all thought of the fact that we live in a water poor region of the world, is forgotten.  Forgotten is the notion of drought by the bureaucrats and politicians that run our city.  Drought is a long forgotten figment in the memory of the population at large as well.  Every drought season, virtually a whole new generation needs to be re-educated in our need to use less water, and how to use less of the precious stuff.  We should not forget what was written in biblical times that we have seven years of drought and seven years of plenty.  While some areas north of Cape Town are experiencing floods of the magnitude seen but forgotten, the floods normally coincide with drought in the Western Cape.

During the years of drought in the Western Cape from 2000 to 2004, Capetonians had restrictions and increases in water tariffs imposed the like of which we hadn’t seen before.  The city even appointed some officers to police water use, which officers disappeared into the woodwork (redeployed), and after higher than average rainfall fell in 2005 all restrictions were lifted with the exception of daily irrigation times(no watering between the times of ten till four 0’clock).  Laughable though it is, this is the only water restriction left, and no police to check on this.  It would be silly too to deploy a police force to check up whether or not you were watering your garden a 10.30 in the morning!

New drought cycle.

We are as I write going into a drought cycle in the Western Cape.  This is going to be the mother of droughts ever seen if the stacked reports from climatologists are correct.  We have been warned of this drought, and our Department of Water and Environmental Affairs should know of this too.  It is strange that the people who work for this governmental department have not applied restrictions in a bid to save water while we still have water in our storage dams. Within eight months there will be panic in local and higher ranking government when we have little or no water.  We will have poor rainfall in the winter of 2011, and 2012 and more than likely 2013. This will mean that the supply dams to Cape Town that are falling at record rates and are already getting low for this time of the year may dry up completely.   There are another three months of summer to go and if the dams continue to fall at this rate (2.8% per week), then expect the dam levels to be at around 45% of capacity by mid April.  It would take a year of higher than average rainfall to put the dams back to where they were at the start of this summer season.  But alas higher than average rainfall is not forecast.  Rainfall of below average is forecast, and perhaps the dams will rise but perchance to less than 80% of capacity.  This is the magic figure at which 30% restrictions get announced, and this decision would be taken in October.

The meaning of 30% restrictions by DWEA

30% restrictions merely mean that DWEA (Department of Water and Environmental Affairs) demand from the Municipality that they show a reduction in demand of 30% less than the volume of water that Cape Town is allocated by DWEA. It is up to Cape Town Municipality as to what restrictions they put in place to lower demand by the prescribed percentage.

Low Fruit

The low fruit has a couple of meanings here.  The first is the low fruit of supply generally, that of dam building and simply robbing rivers of their water. Hereafter desalination of water is the higher fruit as this comes at a price far higher than raw river water.  The second low fruit pertains to the dams, viz water quality in the dams differs from dam to dam, and some are much further away than others.  Also some are deep and others have a huge surface area delivering their yield to evaporation. Actually the aspect of evaporation is very serious.

The low fruit of dam water use has already been picked.  The low fruit of the water in the lower Steenbras dam which though in today’s terms is small, is close to Cape Town and is good quality raw water.  This dam is now below 50% of capacity, and there is precious little inflow to augment the yield.  Although the upper Steenbras is almost full (97%) the majority of this water is stored for electricity power generation. This power generation works under normal circumstances to level the graph of the daily amount of electricity needed for the City of Cape Town which has spikes in the morning and evening, and troughs in the middle of the day and during the night.  During these spikes, water is allowed to flow down to the Gordon’s Bay side through the mountain turning huge hydro electric generators, and in the period of low consumption the water is pumped back up to Steenbras.  However there is a large pipe from the lower dam to the sea, so if we had plenty of water in the upper dam, and needed some extra electricity, this could be used as a hydro electric generation plant until all the water in the dam was used up.  If  we have energy shortages, you bet much of the precious stored water in the upper dam will be used for energy consumption, or at least held in the upper dam for a ‘just in case’, which of course makes this water unavailable for domestic consumption but rather kept for energy generation.

Once the water in the lower Steenbras dams is consumed and it is going fast, then Cape Town Municipality must start to rely more heavily on the poorer quality water from Theewaterskloof and other outlying dams. This water is more expensive to process, and the lower the dam level gets, the worse the quality.

Politicians dam building and jobs.

Election fever has also gripped South Africa, and any immediate talk of water restrictions in the coveted Western Cape must be dispelled.  It seems so strange that the issue of drought which inevitable leads to water restrictions should be seen as bad political management.  The city politicians could not be more wrong.  There is a sense of camaraderie in times of shortages, and we all help each other, and in fact jobs are created during these times.  What is unpopular though is the loss of revenue to the Council when restrictions are imposed.  Revenue from the sale of water goes to the fiscal budget and profits are used wherever the bureaucrats and councillors like.  The less the volume of water that is sold by the municipality, the higher goes the tariffs, and in actual fact an escalation in tariffs is an excellent way of stemming demand for water.  In reality though the city staff who run water supply are well aware that when both tariffs and water restrictions are applied together, the average use per person per day drops which is absolutely logical.  What they don’t like is that the per capita usage once restrictions are lifted never returns to the same point as before the restrictions were imposed and prices escalated.  The following fact is not just surmise:  this is the reason why demand does not increase after restrictions are lifted shows that devices to save water are very effective. Once Water Rhapsody clients use our unique systems, there is no looking back.   The efficiency of the Water Rhapsody Systems goes on and on.  This very important fact was given to me by Dave Ramsay who was the chief water engineer for Cape Town a few years ago.  If only the authorities would realize what they could possible do for our environment by actually promoting water saving with all the tools at their disposal including the devices that Water Rhapsody supply and install.

Job creation through demand management

Far, far more permanent jobs are created during times of drought than the temporary jobs created during dam building activities.   It was so interesting to hear the engineers responsible for the building of the last dam possible in Cape Town, that of the Berg River Scheme, using job creation as a motive to build the dam.  They built temporary houses for their staff and housed them there.  After the dam building process was complete, all the staff were retrenched, and the houses were all sold.  So is it up to those who wish to conserve water to provide jobs?  The answer is an emphatic YES.

Politicians excuse

Of course the fact that there are floods in some parts of the country helps the politicians down play any need for water saving in the Western Cape.  We see daily jockeying for positions for Mayor, party elections, and promises regarding jobs etc.  There is simply no time to address items of so little importance as water, and nobody wants to take an unpopular decision like instituting water restrictions.

Cape Town out of water by 2012

I have stated regularly that the year 2012 will be the year that Cape Town runs out of water.  The debate now will be interesting as to who gets priority over supply of water.  Who will get water in times of outages?  Will farmers get their share?  When Theewaterskloof was built and filled, 90% of water from the dam was assigned for agricultural use.  The farmers though could not use all the water allocated to them and the then DWAF (Department of Water Affairs and Forestry) as it was known then decided that because the farmers did not take up their allocation, that this water would be allocated to Cape Town Municipality.  This gave Cape Town water security in the middle eighties, but since Cape Town has grown so rapidly, this will be insufficient in years of lower than average rainfall, which years we are now in.

Future augmentation – desalination

We have plentiful sea water for desalination purposes do I hear you say?  In order to desalinate enough water to provide one days supply, we will need six million kilowatt hours of electricity. We simply do not have enough energy nor will we be able to find this capacity in the near future. If say at worst we should run out of water completely like Beaufort West.  The average daily demand for water is 1.5 million cubic metres.  The amount of extra energy we would need to desalinate this volume of water would be a minimum of 6 million kilowatt hours every day, for the desalination process.  This water would need to be blended with some other water, most likely treated sewerage water for palatability, and pressurized to municipal pressure.  This would be expensive and with energy we simply won’t be able to find.  Until now all the supply water for Cape Town has been virgin raw water extracted from rivers.  The end to this luxury is nigh.

Water outages

Water outages are a blunt but absolute as an efficient demand management measure (to get people to use less water).  Will we have to endure water outages or wont we?

If everyone installed water saving devices as per the Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation, we would have no need for measures as tough as outages, but this is not the case. The steps of what can be done culminate in the following:  Install the Water Rhapsody Grand Opus to provide rainwater to the whole household.  This unique system receives rainwater from roofs but is also augmented with municipal water to give all households an emergency supply seamlessly. Water Rhapsody fix the emergency supply from the municipal to your water tank/s for an emergency supply when, (not if) the Municipality turn off the water supply.  If you lived in Beaufort West and had installed the Water Rhapsody System, you would have a contiguous supply, and you would be unaffected by outages.  Secondly should you reduce your demand for water (without a change of lifestyle) you could reduce your water demand (usage) by half.  The reduction in demand is essential to get your precious saved rainwater to go so much further, and is done in five ways viz: by re-using grey water for irrigation purposes, or for toilet flushing, by re-using swimming pool backwash water and lastly by the use minimizing toilet flushing.

As restrictions bite, the municipality will quickly wake up to the erosion of their revenue, and will raise water rates.  These rates will represent the price of the next augmentation scheme, and the capital to provide enough energy for running the water augmentation, that is of course desalination.

All of these systems come at a cost, and the question is frequently asked, can we afford to install such systems?  Our answer is a rhetorical question: can we afford not to do these things?  Well the answer will be a resounding YES as soon as restrictions bite, and bite them surely will!

Tens of thousands of migrants pouring into Cape Town are forcing authorities to rethink the city’s water supply strategy.

Migration growth is now "16 000 households per annum" at 5 people per household

The Amathole District Municipality (ADM) has ratified the executive mayor’s approval of R78.55 million from their reserves for drought relief.

Carting water to drought affected areas is not sustainable. Photo by: Theo Jeptha

By 2012 Cape Town will be out of water.  This is not conjecture.

As early as 1995 Professor Bryan Davies, then Head of the fresh Water Research unit at UCT, predicted that Cape Town would [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 19 June 2010

By 2012 Cape Town will be out of water.  This is not conjecture.

As early as 1995 Professor Bryan Davies, then Head of the fresh Water Research unit at UCT, predicted that Cape Town would be dry by 2013.  Not bad from as far back as that.

Theewaterskloof is the biggest supply dam to Cape Town

Over the six past decades, there has been a drought cycle every six to seven years. The last time Cape Town was in a drought was 2004. I have watched this in Cape Town since 1965 when I can first remember the newspapers reporting the dam levels every day, and this has been the case to a greater or lesser extent for the past forty years.

We have always been able to augment further supply by building an additional dam, but not so anymore.  There is not another single place or any more river water that can possibly be found anywhere in the Western Cape for augmenting supply. The Western Cape is simply dammed out of water.  The rest of the country is in no better condition, so we cannot go looking elsewhere to steal this precious resource.

Two ways of augmenting supply to Cape Town have recently been mooted by the minister of DWA (Department of Water Affairs) Buyelwa Sonjica, viz. the desalination of sea water and pumping water out of the Table Mountain aquifer. Simply put, both of these augmentation systems are not sustainable, and should not and must not be pursued. The former is too energy hungry, and the latter means pumping fossil water from the TM aquifer. Clearly these are not options for a way of finding water for Cape Town.

What is studiously being ignored by Minister Sonjica is our ability to use less water, as well as ways to augment our own supply. Minister Sonjica will not be found encouraging citizens to harvest water; mainly because this would not mean any revenue for her department.

However for this to work, we need a few things to fall into place, which things will happen sooner than later.  These are:

• The inability of our city council to process sewerage.  This really is the case already with Cape Town City Council only able to process 65% of the effluent running to their sewerage treatment works. The rest of the semi and untreated sewerage runs into rivers etc.
• The inability of the Department of Water Affairs (the owners of the water in our dams) to meet the increasing demand for water for Cape Town from the rivers in the Western Cape.
• The inability of the City Council to make our drinking water potable.  In this regard, there are a burgeoning number of municipalities around South Africa who admit that they cannot clean the water in the pipelines to a drinkable standard.  Among other reasons for Cape Town is the growing number of informal settlements in our catchment areas. One only has to look at Hout Bay and the condition of the Disa River – the deadly condition of this water kills every living thing in the river and estuary.  The faecal coli (EC) numbers are 9 billion per 100 millilitres of water.  Unacceptable standards are any number higher than 350 per 100 ml.
• Realization by Cape Town City that there is simply not enough money budgeted in the near and distant future for sewage treatment.  We need 6 billion Rand right now to upgrade existing and build new sewage treatment works.  There is not more than 300 million (5% of the need) budgeted over the long term budget for the City to use for this purpose.
• Similarly realization that based on simple arithmetic how much water we will need by 2012.
• Drought. There is conclusive evidence that the Western Cape is being adversely affected by global warming.  The effect of this can be seen clearly today.  Until thirty years ago the character of winter was that it rained for weeks at a time, cleared up for a day or two, and rained for more weeks.  The rain patterns now see us getting one, two or three days of rain followed by a week or two of warm sunshine.  This means that every time it rains, the first ten or even twenty millimetres of rain are needed just to saturate the soil before any run off occurs.  The total number of millimetres of rain may very well be the same but the way it falls makes an enormous difference.  We simply get less run off these days.

What are we able to do about it?

We can augment our own supply.  We should harvest rainwater for using during the rainy season.

The system for this is the Water Rhapsody Grand Opus, which starts with the Water Rhapsody Rain Runner to harvest water from the whole of a roof.  The harvested rainwater is delivered by an unobtrusive underground pipeline around the building, called a ring main, to water tanks (of which there are a large number of different sizes available). Each Rain Runner from each downpipe tees into the ring main.

Rainwater tanks fill very quickly, but an overflowing rainwater tank is not very romantic, so Water Rhapsody plan cleverly to balance the inflow, volume stored and the amount required in the household.

Stored rainwater is then pumped to the whole household. In practice, the stored rainwater is able to sustain the number of people in an average home / business without any municipal feed for an entire rainfall season, and of course in Cape Town, this is in the winter season.

Capetonians use on average 240 litres per person per day, but by using the WWF award winning Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation you get to use less water without changing your lifestyle. You will with these systems effectively reduce your daily water use from 240 litres to – at worst 120 litres per day. If you do this, stored rainwater will go much further, getting most householders to be completely “off the grid”. This is certainly true for the rain season, and most of the dry season too.  Getting “off the grid” is something we all aspire to, and if we can use all the systems as made and installed by Water Rhapsody, one gets as close to this magic point as is possible.

What we would have done in effect for DWEA and the Municipality without them appreciating us one bit, is to increase the stored water in the dams by a volume of water that is difficult to imagine. It is not just the stored water in one single filling that increases the volume in total, but the yield (which is the number of times the water tanks may be filled and drawn down), and then of course filled again. Should everyone through their own initiative install such a system to harvest, store, and use rainwater, this will make a total annual difference of more than 200 million kilolitres.

This is an amount that I am unable to imagine so for yours and my benefit I have created some analogies:

The volume of the total yield from all the water tanks (total number of times they are filled and drawn down) is the equivalent of more water than the total volume of the second biggest supply dam to Cape Town.  The biggest supply dam to Cape Town is Theewaterskloof near Villiersdorp which holds when full 480 million kilolitres, but not all that water is available for us to use.

Another analogy (bearing in mind the fact that the average use of water in Cape Town per household is 28 kilolitres per month), is saving a kilolitre or tonne of water per household per day.  Put this water into road water tankers and park them nose to tail, and these trucks would stretch from Cape Town to Johannesburg.  Over a whole season, these tankers would stretch around the world (at the equator nose to tail) ten times!

Yet another analogy is to imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool full of water.  The amount of water saved would fill 1350 of these pools per day.

Emergency supply. Yet another of the advantages of having rainwater tanks is that you create an emergency supply against future water outages.  Water outages are the very next way that our municipality will use to get us to use less water.  By having Water Rhapsody to install water tanks to harvest rainwater, for your benefit they will install an emergency supply fed from the municipality, which guarantees the householder of a continuous supply in spite of outages.

Water Rhapsody will provide something for all seasons.

Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor

State-owned oil company PetroSA is to invest R80 million in the construction of a 200 cubic metre an hour desalination plant. The construction of the plant would alleviate the impact of drought in Mossel Bay [...]]]> Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 27 May 2010

State-owned oil company PetroSA is to invest R80 million in the construction of a 200 cubic metre an hour desalination plant. The construction of the plant would alleviate the impact of drought in Mossel Bay and the southern Cape, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Wolwedans Dam is used by Petro SA to operate the GTL refinery

“The plant will provide five mega-litres of water per day, and should address PetroSA’s water requirements for operating its gas-to-liquid (GTL) refinery in Mossel Bay,” said PetroSA.

It would join forces with the Mossel Bay municipality in an attempt to desalinate sea-water for use by both the company and the town. “It is envisaged that the desalination plant should be operational by November 2010,” it said.

The Mossel Bay Municipality said the town was facing its worst drought in 130 years. “The drought has reached such critical proportions that the Eden District area of the southern Cape has been declared a disaster area,” it said.

The water level in the Wolwedans Dam, which PetroSA uses to operate the GTL refinery, was at 12,5 percent and it was projected that no more water would be available by October 2010.

PetroSA said in had introduced several measures in the past couple of months to save water and manage water usage in Mossel Bay. These included recycling 60 cubic metres an hour of storm water at a cost of R8m and recycling 170 cubic metres an hour of treated effluent. There had also been a R22.5-million investment in an effluent water purification project run by the Mossel Bay municipality.

“These improvements are significant for the 600 cubic metres per hour water requirement of the GTL refinery and should mitigate the water supply risk to the refinery,” PetroSA said. The oil company said it had also encouraged its employees to participate in the water saving campaign by reporting any potable water and firewater leaks for immediate repair.

The desalination plant would be constructed at PetroSA’s logistics base, close to the Mossel Bay harbour. The logistics base lay-down area was large enough to accommodate the desalination plant and already had power supply, PetroSA said.

The area was also in close proximity to the GTL refinery water supply line and had suitable sea conditions for water extraction.

- Sapa