More than half

Good news from Cape Town’s previously much maligned dams this week as the latest figures, released a few moments ago (we can like to bring you the good news first), show that we now have 53.7% fillage:

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That means that we’re some 10% better off than a fortnight ago, not least because of the deluge that hit us last Tuesday.

Woo hoo! *turns on all the taps*

We’re still well short of the (at least) 75% we’d like to see as a minimum by the end of winter, though.

Ah. *turns all taps off again*

However, at this rate, given another 4 weeks of reasonable winter weather, we might just make it. And there’s another hefty bunch of moisture coming through tomorrow evening already, with Windguru predicting almost an inch of quickfire precipitation over Cape Town in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Add to that the inexorable season creep that seems to have befallen the Western Cape in the last decade, and we’ve probably got another few weeks after that as well.

Be reminded that the ever-so-well-enforced Level 2 water restrictions still remain in force though.

2 thoughts on “More than half

  1. Good news – but the figures leave me wondering how can a reservoir (Steenbras Upper) be over 100% full? Does the capacity need revising? Or do you think there a taskteam of city officials collecting all the overflowing water in handy plastic containers?

  2. ItsStillAyoba > Yes, there is.

    (No, there isn’t.)

    Each dam has a measured capacity, which it was designed to hold – those are the figures you see above in Ml. However, that generally isn’t right to the top of the wall. That’s certainly the case for the dams above. There is a small (<4%) extra amount that the dams can take above their intended capacity before they overflow. This is often for flood mitigation purposes. It's not counted in the intended capacity of the dam, but we'll still use it if we can. I don't think we're going to be troubling those this year though.
    This isn't a uniquely South African thing. Here's the Derwent Reservoir at 100% capacity - you can see that there's room for more (albeit not a lot more):

    before it overflows:

    .

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