The City of Cape Town will reach the so-called reach Day Zero if stubborn residents continue to use water excessively, mayor Patricia de Lille said on Sunday.
“While the city is doing everything in its power to bring additional water online, all Capetonians must reduce their water usage to below 87 litres per person per day,” she said after accompanying City of Cape Town water and sanitation department officials to a number of homes as part of ongoing efforts to restrict households who, despite warnings and appeals to reduce water usage, were still using excessive amounts of water.
“This is the only way Cape Town can avoid Day Zero when all residents play their part and save water while the city builds new water projects.
This means that, on average, the daily consumption of these households often exceeded 1000 litres per day.” Many high users maintained a stubborn attitude in this time of water scarcity and had prevented city staff and contractors from accessing their properties to install the devices.
The residents at these three properties also had no outstanding queries on their water accounts and had not requested a quota increase from the city, De Lille said.
“We have begged people to save water, but we cannot allow the flagrant abuse of water to continue unabated.” The city had taken action to install water management devices at 18,597 high consumption households across the city so far where contraventions had occurred.
In August, the city started the roll-out of water management devices to restrict excessive users to 350 litres per day.
Properties where consumption above 350 litres per day was justified could, however, make representation to the city to request a quota extension by submitting an affidavit with the names and identity numbers of people living on a property.
In such cases where there were more than four people, the city would set the water management device to the appropriate level so that each person had 87 litres of water per day.
– African News Agency