Coastal grass, usually green and soft, has turned yellow and crackly, and that’s because we are officially in a period of declining rain and water reserves. On Friday, the Eastern Cape office of the national water and sanitation department announced that the province’s water levels were declining in a “gradual but concerning” manner. Dam levels declined by 1%, from 74.1% to 73.1% last week, according to the department’s weekly water reservoir status report, said national spokesperson Wisane Mavasa.
However, the losses per individual dam are higher, according to the provincial state of dams weekly report. There is a stark anomaly: large dams in the eastern half of the province are close to full. The cause of the decline, officially, is “persistent below-average rainfall”, but local public interest group Green Ripple spokesperson Kevin Harris said: “This pattern for SA of an increasingly flooded east and drying out west was predicted by climate scientists years ago.
“Now, in our sixth La Nina summer global weather pattern in a row, we need to start being aware of how our over-heated climate is affecting us.” The dryness is shifting east. Eastern Cape residents have watched the dams to the west drying out and causing many critical water shortages for Nelson Mandela Bay, but Mavasa said Buffalo City’s supplier, the Amathole Water Supply System, “is also under strain”. He said the Amathole system’s levels had dropped from 88.0% to 87.1% last week.
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Bridle Drift Dam, which supplies the city’s Umzonyana water purification works, has declined from 80.1% to 78.3% (1.8%). Nahoon Dam has decreased from 67.9% to 66.4% (1.5%), while Rooikrans Dam remains lower than its levels recorded in previous weeks, at 81.5%. He said NMB’s Algoa Water Supply System continued to experience notable pressure, with overall system levels now below 50%.
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