Cape Town Water Crisis // Where Is The Water Actually Going?

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Source: Adam Spires – Wannabe Vlogger

You will NEVER BELIEVE where CAPE TOWNS WATER is really going… FOLLOW ME ON: FB: https://www.facebook.com/adamspiresvl… Insta: @adamspiresvlog Special thanks for Siv Ngesi for co-producing this as well as Chris from Cape Town for doing the filming. Food vs Water Source: http://www.imeche.org/…/defa…/reports… Cape Town is hurtling towards “Day Zero”: the day taps run dry. This is expected in mid-May, just weeks after the city’s new water supplies are due. Cape Town is quite used to surviving dry years. Water restrictions get it through and then dams refill, thanks to the wet years that usually follow. But this time it’s different. Never in recorded history has Cape Town encountered a drought of such severity for three consecutive years. One of the biggest debates is whether local government is handling the crisis effectively. Investigating this question exposes politics, not rainfall, at the heart of the problem. The Western Cape is the only province in the country run by the Democratic Alliance, while the African National Congress runs the rest. This means that the relationship between national government and the Western Cape is complicated, as the water crisis shows. Two tiers of governance – the Western Cape province and the City of Cape Town – went above and beyond what was required to prepare for drought. The system failed, however, at the level of national government. Wasteful expenditure in the national Department of Water and Sanitation, erroneous water allocations to agriculture and a failure to acknowledge or respond to provincial and municipal calls for help obstructed timely interventions. National government’s numerous spanners jammed up the works of a system that could have managed the crisis quite effectively. The Western Cape’s water situation Six major dams make up 99.6% of the volume of water in the Western Cape Water Supply System. Cape Town’s strategy for handling droughts is based on a warning system that kicks in when dam levels are lower than normal for a particular time of year. About once every ten years, there is extremely low rainfall around the major Theewaterskloof Dam. The last dam level scare was in 2004-2005. In 2007, the national Department of Water and Sanitation issued a warning about Cape Town’s water supply, saying the city would need new water sources by 2015. The deadline was based on normal rainfall and water demand trends. Unusually dry winters and higher water consumption could shorten this deadline considerably. Two tiers of governance – the Western Cape province and the City of Cape Town – went above and beyond what was required to prepare for drought. The system failed, however, at the level of national government. Wasteful expenditure in the national Department of Water and Sanitation, erroneous water allocations to agriculture and a failure to acknowledge or respond to provincial and municipal calls for help obstructed timely interventions. National government’s numerous spanners jammed up the works of a system that could have managed the crisis quite effectively. The Western Cape’s water situation Six major dams make up 99.6% of the volume of water in the Western Cape Water Supply System.