City calls for lowering of water restrictions

The City has called for the current water restrictions to be relaxed.

The City of Cape Town says it hopes the latest rainfall would provide sufficient motivation for finally easing the water restrictions.

This decision is currently being considered by the National Department of Water and Sanitation, the City said in a statement.

Dam levels have improved by 3.9%, rising to 65.9% of storage capacity since last week.

The City said any relaxation of restrictions would at first be conservative.

“The rainfall over the past few weeks, combined with continued saving efforts by the vast majority of residents, has seen dams fill to levels the City hasn’t seen in years.

“We have managed to steer ourselves away from disaster, but must now start considering how best to manage our recovery going forward,” said deputy mayor Ian Neilson.

“Although much work is planned over the next few years to augment the City’s water supply and continue to create awareness about water conservation, we must remember that we live in a region with a semi-arid climate. At the moment, we will still rely on our dams to provide the majority of our water.

“Given the unpredictable nature of our rainfall, it is imperative that we diversify our supply for the future, and entrench the water-saving mind-set we have cultivated over the past year,” said Mr Neilson.

The average water consumption for the past week was 535 million litres a day, which is an increase from last week’s consumption of 513 million litres a day.