War of words erupts as Cape Town battles drought
Publish date: 17 October 2017
Issue Number: 529
Diary: Legalbrief Environmental
Category: Health
The City of Cape Town is in a race against time to use water from its first desalination plant, as increasingly uncomfortable residents feel the bite of tighter water restrictions, writes Legalbrief. Cape Town will have its first desalination plants working just weeks before the city's dams are expected to dry up, notes a TimesLIVE report. That’s according to the city's mayoral committee member for informal settlements, water waste services and energy, Xanthea Limberg. ‘Monwabisi and Strandfontein (plants) are currently scheduled for February 2018‚ but we are exploring opportunities to implement earlier‚ once internal funding issues are resolved‚’ Limberg said. The general manager of water solutions company Veolia‚ Chris Braybrooke‚ said that completion of tenders for the desalination plants‚ which first went public in August‚ should have taken place six months ago‚ and that the city’s water problem was a ‘ticking time bomb’. Braybrooke‚ whose company has built several desalination plants in SA – including the country’s largest one in Mossel Bay – said: ‘For this type of tender‚ this should have happened at least six months ago. We’re waiting for the time when citizens will run out of water.’ Braybrooke added: ‘It is a ticking time bomb and people are scrambling for solutions.’ MEC for Environmental Affairs in the Western Cape‚ Anton Bredell‚ warned that desalination would not come cheap‚ and that ratepayers would be forced to dig into their pockets to pay for the new technology. ‘At the end of the day‚ water is going to be much more expensive. That’s a fact. We will know by how much after the tender process. It’s an argument of expensive water or no water‚’ said Bredell.
More than 1 000 water management devices have been installed in homes across Cape Town, as the city begins implementing stricter strategies to force down water usage. According to a Cape Times report, this, however, is far below the city’s initial aim to install about 2 000 devices a week. Limberg is quoted in the report as saying: ‘It is all hands on deck and this, and other operations, are happening on a 24/7 basis. High (water) users are being addressed across the city.’ Dam storage levels are at 37.8%, with useable water at 27.8%. Consumption remains at 607m litres of collective usage per day, 107m litres above the crucial consumption target of 500m litres. The city’s plan to avoid acute water shortages comprises three phases: phase 1 has been activated with water rationing through extreme pressure reduction. As water rationing is intensified, this will lead to intermittent, localised temporary water supply disruptions. Phase 2 is a disaster stage. Residents will be able to collect a predefined quantity of drinking water per person per day from water collection sites. Phase 3 is the extreme disaster phase. Non-surface drinking water supplies, from groundwater abstraction from various aquifers and spring water, will be available for drinking purposes only. ‘The implementation of further phases would primarily depend on water consumption and how quickly all water users in Cape Town respond to the call to drastically reduce consumption,’ Limberg said. Predictions are that by March next year municipal water would not be available if consumption is not reduced.
Companies are doing a roaring trade in boreholes and well points. According to a Cape Argus report, Charl de Wet from CA Wellpoints and Boreholes said they were struggling to keep up with the demand for boreholes and well points. ‘The demand is so high that we cannot help everyone. And it will peak even further next month during summer,’ he said. ‘Customers are telling me that grey water is not working and they rather want a borehole. They’re using the borehole water for their gardens and for topping-up their swimming pools. Some are even drinking the borehole water after purifying it. Now that we have Level 5 water restrictions, demand for boreholes and well points has increased even more,’ he said. Another company, De Wets Wellpoints and Boreholes, also said they’d seen an increase in requests for the installation of boreholes and wellpoints. The company’s Gabby de Wet said demand was far higher than the service providers in the industry were able to cope with. Simone Smith from Exsolar said they had put people on waiting lists.
An environmental lawyer has expressed outrage over swimming pools being filled with borehole water. A Cape Argus report notes that Terry Winstanley, head of environmental law at Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr, said while the amount of water being extracted from boreholes cannot be policed, they are aware of reports of people filling their swimming pools with borehole water. Winstanley said: ‘If we use ground water unwisely, it will run out. We cannot get this water back unless it rains. So the use of aquifers will likely be restricted by our ability to access the water at increasingly deeper levels, or it will just run out.’ Winstanley said that under the old Water Act of 1956, a distinction was made between public and private water. She said there is a very different approach to water under the current National Water Act. ‘The new Act stipulates that the state holds all water, regardless of its origin, in trust for the nation and allocates use rights. Under this act, water use for specified purposes is subject to certain thresholds, beyond which a licence must be obtained. ‘Regulations need to be strictly enforced to prevent the further mismanagement of water in the region,’ she said. Environmental affairs MEC Anton Bredell also warned last week that the drought would in all likelihood get worse until the next rainfall season.
A Cape-based water desalination company, which is completing plants in India and Saudi Arabia that will deliver 800m litres of potable water a day, has lambasted the city for failing to act faster to boost the region’s water supply. According to a Cape Argus report, Strand-based GrahamTek submitted a proposal in May to provide the region with 450m litres a day within 18 months at ‘affordable’ prices. It has accused the city of failing to appreciate the scale of the water crisis and the urgency of finding solutions, of putting out tenders for ‘Mickey Mouse’-scale projects with terms so complex and onerous that the tenders were not feasible and of wasting months before putting out the first workable tender – only last week. But the city insists it was constrained by ‘procurement mechanisms within the bounds of the law’. GrahamTek CE, Julius Steyn, is quoted in the report as saying: ‘I am very frustrated. The solution could have been provided. There’s absolutely no excuse for this failure. They ignored the warnings in meeting after meeting, possibly for fear of doing something wrong.’
Key partners in the extraction of groundwater to augment Cape Town's water supply believe that the city's current 100m litres per day target is impossible. According to a News24 report, speaking as an audience member at a Muizenberg Festival gathering last week, Umvoto earth sciences consultancy director John Holmes explained that the total yield from groundwater extraction remains largely unknown. Umvoto is one of the city's main partners to develop the Table Mountain Group Aquifer and Cape Flats Aquifer for groundwater extraction. ‘Theoretically, it's possible to extract 100m litres per day from that aquifer. Is that going to happen by December this year? Absolutely not,’ Holmes said. Holmes, an engineer, echoed the statements of his colleague, hydrologist Chris Hartnady, who said water extraction from the Table Mountain Group Aquifer is a long-term project. During his presentation, Hartnady said their current expectation is to extract up to 10m cubic metres a year from the Table Mountain Group Aquifer, roughly 27m litres per day. ‘But implementing that in a short space of time is not going to be easy. We are not committing to any definite figures by any definite dates,’ he said. ‘We've delayed for too long. We had five years more or less of kicking our heels and that's been a very frustrating experience.' Jasper Slingsby from the SA Environmental Observation Network, explained that up to three months of the city's water needs is lost through invasive species. ‘At the moment, the existing invasive species in our primary catchments in Cape Town are using as much water as the entire Wemmershoek Dam,’ he said. ‘In terms of clearing, I think it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than desalination or any of the alternatives the city is thinking of,’ Slingsby said.
There have been repeated warnings over the years about the Western Cape water situation, notes a News24 report. A 2010 situation analysis by the Department of Water Affairs, entitled ‘Integrated water resource planning for South Africa’, said that climate change was ‘a major threat’ to Western Cape water resources. A June 2005 document, ‘A Status Quo, Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment of the Physical and Socio-Economic Effects of Climate Change in the Western Cape’, which was co-ordinated by the SA National Biodiversity Institute, and which also displays a provincial government logo, said the province was then already experiencing a drought. It warned of ‘a looming crisis in water supply’. Kevin Winter, of the environmental and geographical science department at UCT, however, does not think the water shortage warnings a decade ago were strong and convincing. ‘Sure, there was a tough period in 2004 and 2005, but the City's Water Demand Management programme worked really well, in fact too well, but this programme only works when there is sufficient rainfall,’ he said. ‘The difficulty is about preparing for severe drought. That's not easy to predict and is always going to be too costly to prevent failure.’
