Cape Town - South Africa's department of water and sanitation on Wednesday said the steady rainfall over the past weeks has seen several dams across the country overflowing.
A weekly report by the department indicated that the rain was soft but intense enough to soak the soil and restored groundwater for basic use.
“Improvements in the past two weeks have been noticed in most provinces, namely Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Free State, North West and KwaZulu-Natal. The report shows that national average dam levels have increased significantly from 70.5% last week to 75.2% this week,” the department said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the City of Cape Town has also referred to a 0,3 percent drop in the level of dams supplying Cape Town as good news.
According to the City’s deputy mayor, Ian Neilson, during the past week, the dams supplying Cape Town declined by 0,3 percent to to 21,9 percent.
“This decline, which is lower than in previous weeks, is a welcome confirmation of the impact of the continued efforts by Capetonians to save water, and includes a small contribution from rainfall,” said Neilson.
“Dam levels are however still lower than they were in previous years at this time, and we have to continue our saving efforts to ensure that we get through this year safely. Our collective consumption over the past week was 521 million litres of water per day, which indicates a stabilisation of consumption at lower levels than were being achieved in January and February. While this remains a considerable achievement, as a City we need to continue to work harder to reduce consumption even further.”