Told that there is less than 100 days of water in their dams, the locals can be forgiven for worrying.
It will rain again in Cape Town, we just don’t know exactly when.
Sure, it happened in 2017 not 2016, but the dams are now full.
Cape Town’s story is almost exactly the same.
They fail to understand that inaction very quickly turns a one-in-50-year risk to one-in-20 years or sooner.
We dispute the argument that the city failed to act despite warnings of a potential drought crisis and that water-demand management and the conservation interventions that have been favoured over investment in new infrastructure have not been effective.
Muller underplays the success of these initiatives, when in fact they were so successful that the Department of Water and Sanitation was prompted to update its strategic water resource plan in 2016 to indicate that the need for additional supply schemes for the region would now be required only by 2021.
But that is exactly what the city should be doing.
The job of the water managers — and their political heads — is to ensure water security in times of drought.
Of course, water restrictions are an option.