More water

If you have been in or around the Western Cape over the past couple of weeks, you can’t have missed the rain we’ve been having. It’s caused floods, landslides, death and misery. However, on the bright side, it has also filled up our dams nicely.

Hoorah!

But it was only when I read the City’s weekly dam level figures, published each and every Monday, that I realised just how much it had filled up our 6 local dams.

It’s the last two columns you want to look at – this week versus last week – indicating that the percentage storage in our dams has increased by 7.7% in just 7 days. That’s good news, as we need the water for our long dry summer (remember that?).

7.7% is quite a lot, incidentally. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations (while fuelled by Diemersfontein pinotage) and it appears to me that we have almost 69 billion more litres stored than we had this time last week. 68,609,000,000 litres to be exact.
That’s enough to fill 27,443 Olympic size swimming pools, although if you were to actually do that, I wouldn’t be allowed to water my garden in February.

So don’t.

2 thoughts on “More water

  1. And the best part is there’s still snow on the mountains, which means that those dams will be filling up more in the weeks to come.

    The funny part is that we’ve still got water restrictions in place. And they won’t be lifted no matter what. Why not? Because even if all the dams were as full as they can be, there are now too many people in Cape Town for the water supply, and no more suitable sites for dams to be built. Such capacity as we have now, is what we have.

    So when February comes along, don’t be doing that watering between 10am and 4pm.

  2. Gary > I never water during daylight hours. Except yesterday (at 4:01pm) that is, when I watered two moles out of their tunnels.
    They are now ex-moles.

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