After 2 Driest Years On Record, Cape Town Within 100 Days Of Running Out Of Drinking Water

[hatrack]

Cape Town, the crown jewel of South Africa’s tourism industry, has 100 days before it runs out of water.

After two years of the least rainfall on record, the average level of the six main dams that supply the city of 3.7 million people has dropped below 30 percent, one of the lowest levels on record. The last 10 percent of the reservoir water is unusable, and the risk is mounting that taps and pipes will stop flowing before the onset of the winter rainy season that normally starts in May or June.

Even if the supply stretches until then, heavy downpours may be needed to avert outages over the next two years in South Africa’s second-biggest city. Each year more than 850,000 people from the region and abroad fly through the international airport in Cape Town, which the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper has rated as the top city destination for the past four years.

“We are in a real crisis,” Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the Women4Climate conference in New York on March 8. “People will have to change the way they are doing things. You can only save water while you have water.”

EDIT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-16/with-just-100-days-of-water-left-cape-town-risks-running-dry

[procon]

1. 3.7 million people in migration in a search for water is a nightmare scenario. nt