To most it would sound like something out of a SciFi movie; something that belongs in the distant future, but in Cape Town, South Africa it is a reality:
We are nearly out of water.
Best rank: 634 in non-fiction on 8 February 2018
A combination of factors led to the disaster we now find ourselves in.
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That is our biggest dam. That photo was taken last year.
Part of the issue is poor planning by the government. They didn't know that the drought would be this bad. We had a bad drought a few years ago, but it never got this bad. Not even close. The dams filled up again soon after because we had an excellent year of rain.
For the past three years we have been receiving far less rain that usual. Here is an annual cumulative rainfall graph to give you an idea:
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The black line is the average amount of rain. You can clearly see how little rain we've had recently. The only other line down there is from 1994. Our last drought didn't even get close to being this bad.
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The river above another major dam.
Climate change change is a major cause for our drought. It is believed that El niño was responsible for the start of the drought, but things have only got worse over the past few years.
Lack of infrastructure is another cause. Since 1995 the population of Cape Town has increased by 79% while the dam storage capacity has only increased by 15%.
The government is currently building desalination plants and infrastructure to abstract ground water, but that is not enough.
The government can't fully be blamed although they did play a major role in worsening the impact of the drought. At least the national government did (although the provincial government could have done more).
The Western Cape government was warned a couple of years ago thst they would need new water sources, so they kicked off various programmes. These were so effective that that date was kicked back to 2019 and they were well on target to meeting this deadline. This figure was, however based on normal rainfall. Then the drought hit.
They turned to the National government for funding, who turned them down because the dam levels were still high enough. The next year they agree to declare five municipalities as drought areas, Cape Town was not one of them. By October 2017 the funds had still not been released.
Of course, consumption is also a cause. Water restrictions have been in place but not everyone has been following them. Despite that, water consumption has halved in the past two years. I believe that these restrictions should have been implemented from the beginning and monitored much more strictly. Maybe then, we wouldn't have reached the point of no return.
The situation is tense here. People are panicking. People are worrying. Let's hope that we get some good rain this winter.
