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. Continue reading Cape Town out of Water by 2012