[imagesource: Karen Sandison/African News Agency]

During the height of Cape Town’s Day Zero panic, the idea of the taps running dry filled residents with fear.

That was the second scariest part of it all, with Splash, the Day Zero mascot, way out in front.

Thankfully, after a solid few months of rainfall, our dam levels have been significantly topped up, although I hope that force of habit means we’ll remain water wise for years to come.

Before we get to Gauteng, here are the Cape’s major dams and their respective levels as of yesterday, via the City of Cape Town’s website:

Pretty, pretty good.

Meanwhile, the Vaal Dam, which is Gauteng’s main water supply, has dropped to worryingly low levels, with water caution urged in the province.

The Daily Maverick reports:

By 17 September 2020, the Vaal Dam had dropped to a startling 36% compared with 57.6% last year during the same period. The dam hit a record 30% low in 2016 during the drought that crippled SA’s farming industry and affected the water supply for communities.

The dam serves as a key economic accelerator, supplying water to about 46% of the country’s economy — and 33% of the population — and forms part of the Integrated Vaal River System (IVRS).

The problem isn’t limited to rainfall, though.

The Vaal Dam relies on catchment upstream of the dam, which has been affected “as a result of collapsed wastewater treatment plants and pollutants from nearby industries”.

In short, you can point to mismanagement as the key culprit:

Ekurhuleni Water Care Company was appointed from June 2019 with the task of fully restoring the water network and ensuring functional waste waterworks and pumping, with a budget of R114-million, but ended up going over budget by R36-million. Yet the problems with waste waterworks in the Emfuleni region remain…

If you ask Mike Muller, the chairperson of the Water Institute of Southern Africa’s technical committee, there could be a major problem down the line.

In recent months, he’s gone as far as to say that delays in implementing phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands water project “makes it more likely that we will repeat Cape Town’s painful self-inflicted drought disaster”.

More from his Business Day column back in July:

Gauteng and much of the surrounding region gets its water from the interconnected dams and rivers that make up the integrated Vaal River system. That is perhaps 20-million people and almost half the SA economy, all of which is already at risk.

The region is already using all the water the system can reliably provide, but population and water demand are growing at 3% annually…The slow-onset institutional disaster that had rendered the department increasingly dysfunctional over the past decade has already delayed Polihali until 2026 and substantially increased its cost…

If the Vaal system’s supply fails, those costs will be astronomical — one more consequence of prioritising the urgent over the important.

Not at all ideal.

When crunch time rolls around, Vaalies, you can always ask a Capetonian for their water-saving tips, as we’ve been through this already.

On the upside, today is basically a ‘fake Friday’, so there’s something to cling to.

[sources:dailymav&busday]