“Does it take a genius to predict drought?

While the fear of water restrictions work in favour of those of us who are involved in water conservation, it would be preferable for all of us to have smoothed restrictions rather than an all or nothing scenario.  All of us mean the population at large, the municipality, the Department of Environmental Affairs as well as Water Rhapsody. Please let me explain?

Cycle of drought

Six, seven years or perhaps even eight years may elapse between one and the next season of drought.  These years between drought cycles are winter months in Cape Town of higher than average rainfall, and the reverse in the northern regions of South Africa where we get summer rains. During these years of higher than average rainfall, all thought of the fact that we live in a water poor region of the world, is forgotten.  Forgotten is the notion of drought by the bureaucrats and politicians that run our city.  Drought is a long forgotten figment in the memory of the population at large as well.  Every drought season, virtually a whole new generation needs to be re-educated in our need to use less water, and how to use less of the precious stuff.  We should not forget what was written in biblical times that we have seven years of drought and seven years of plenty.  While some areas north of Cape Town are experiencing floods of the magnitude seen but forgotten, the floods normally coincide with drought in the Western Cape.

During the years of drought in the Western Cape from 2000 to 2004, Capetonians had restrictions and increases in water tariffs imposed the like of which we hadn’t seen before.  The city even appointed some officers to police water use, which officers disappeared into the woodwork (redeployed), and after higher than average rainfall fell in 2005 all restrictions were lifted with the exception of daily irrigation times(no watering between the times of ten till four 0’clock).  Laughable though it is, this is the only water restriction left, and no police to check on this.  It would be silly too to deploy a police force to check up whether or not you were watering your garden a 10.30 in the morning!

New drought cycle.

We are as I write going into a drought cycle in the Western Cape.  This is going to be the mother of droughts ever seen if the stacked reports from climatologists are correct.  We have been warned of this drought, and our Department of Water and Environmental Affairs should know of this too.  It is strange that the people who work for this governmental department have not applied restrictions in a bid to save water while we still have water in our storage dams. Within eight months there will be panic in local and higher ranking government when we have little or no water.  We will have poor rainfall in the winter of 2011, and 2012 and more than likely 2013. This will mean that the supply dams to Cape Town that are falling at record rates and are already getting low for this time of the year may dry up completely.   There are another three months of summer to go and if the dams continue to fall at this rate (2.8% per week), then expect the dam levels to be at around 45% of capacity by mid April.  It would take a year of higher than average rainfall to put the dams back to where they were at the start of this summer season.  But alas higher than average rainfall will is not forecast.  Rainfall of below average is forecast, and perhaps the dams will rise but perchance to less than 80% of capacity.  This is the magic figure at which 30% restrictions get announced, and this decision would be taken in October.

The meaning of 30% restrictions by DWEA

30% restrictions merely mean that DWEA (Department of Water and Environmental Affairs) demand from the Municipality that they show a reduction in demand of 30% less than the volume of water that Cape Town is allocated by DWEA. It is up to Cape Town Municipality as to what restrictions they put in place to lower demand by the prescribed percentage.

Low Fruit

The low fruit has a couple of meanings here.  The first is the low fruit of supply generally, that of dam building and simply robbing rivers of their water. Hereafter desalination of water is the higher fruit as this comes at a price far higher than raw river water.  The second low fruit pertains to the dams, viz water quality in the dams differs from dam to dam, and some are much further away than others.  Also some are deep and others have a huge surface area delivering their yield to evaporation. Actually the aspect of evaporation is very serious.

The low fruit of dam water use has already been picked.  The low fruit of the water in the lower Steenbras dam which though in today’s terms is small, is close to Cape Town and is good quality raw water.  This dam is now below 50% of capacity, and there is precious little inflow to augment the yield.  Although the upper Steenbras is almost full (97%) the majority of this water is stored for electricity power generation. This power generation works under normal circumstances to level the graph of the daily amount of electricity needed for the City of Cape Town which has spikes in the morning and evening, and troughs in the middle of the day and during the night.  During these spikes, water is allowed to flow down to the Gordon’s Bay side through the mountain turning huge hydro electric generators, and in the period of low consumption the water is pumped back up to Steenbras.  However there is a large pipe from the lower dam to the sea, so if we had plenty of water in the upper dam, and needed some extra electricity, this could be used as a hydro electric generation plant until all the water in the dam was used up.  If  we have energy shortages, you bet much of the precious stored water in the upper dam will be used for energy consumption, or at least held in the upper dam for a just in case, which of course makes this water unavailable for domestic consumption but rather kept for energy generation.

Once the water in the lower Steenbras dams is consumed and it is going fast, then Cape Town Municipality must start to rely more heavily on the poorer quality water from Theewaterskloof and other outlying dams. This water is more expensive to process, and the lower the dam level gets, the worse the quality.

Politicians dam building and jobs.

Election fever has also gripped South Africa, and any immediate talk of water restrictions in the coveted Western Cape must be dispelled.  It seems so strange that the issue of drought which inevitable leads to water restrictions should be seen as bad political management.  The city politicians could not be more wrong.  There is a sense of camaraderie in times of shortages, and we all help each other, and in fact jobs are created during these times.  What is unpopular though is the loss of revenue to the Council when restrictions are imposed.  Revenue from the sale of water goes to the fiscal budget and profits are used wherever the bureaucrats and councillors like.  The less the volume of water that is sold by the municipality, the higher goes the tariffs, and in actual fact an escalation in tariffs is an excellent way of stemming demand for water.  In reality though the city staff who run water supply are well aware that when both tariffs and water restrictions are applied together, the average use per person per day drops which is absolutely logical.  What they dont like is that the per capita usage once restrictions are lifted never returns to the same point as before the restrictions were imposed and prices escalated.  The following fact is not just surmise:  this is the reason why demand does not increase after restrictions are lifted shows that devices to save water are very effective. Once Water Rhapsody clients use our unique systems, there is no looking back.   The efficiency of the Water Rhapsody Systems goes on and on.  This very important fact was given to me by Dave Ramsay who was the chief water engineer for Cape Town a few years ago.  If only the authorities would realize what they could possible do for our environment by actually promoting water saving with all the tools at their disposal including the devices that Water Rhapsody supply and install.

Job creation through demand management

Far, far more permanent jobs are created during times of drought than the temporary jobs created during dam building activities.   It was so interesting to hear the engineers responsible for the building of the last dam possible in Cape Town that of the Berg River Scheme using job creation as a motive to build the dam.  They built temporary houses for their staff and housed them there.  After the dam building process was complete, all the staff were retrenched, and the houses were all sold.  So is it up to those who wish to conserve water to provide jobs?  The answer is an emphatic YES.

Politicians excuse

Of course the fact that there are floods in some parts of the country helps the politicians down play any need for water saving in the Western Cape.  We see daily jockeying for positions for Mayor, party elections, and promises regarding jobs etc.  There is simply no time to address items of so little importance as water, and nobody wants to take an unpopular decision like instituting water restrictions.

Cape Town out of water by 2012

I have stated regularly that the year 2012 will be the year that Cape Town runs out of water.  The debate now will be interesting as to who gets priority over supply of water.  Who will get water in times of outages?  Will farmers get their share?  When Theewaterskloof was built and filled, 90% of water from the dam was assigned for agricultural use.  The farmers though could not use all the water allocated to them and the then DWAF (Department of Water Affairs and Forestry) as it was known then decided that because the farmers did not take up their allocation, that this water would be allocated to Cape Town Municipality.  This gave Cape Town water security in the middle eighties, but since Cape Town has grown so rapidly, this will be insufficient in years of lower than average rainfall, which years we are now in.

Future augmentation – desalination

We have plentiful sea water for desalination purposes do I hear you say?  In order to desalinate enough water to provide one days supply, we will need six million kilowatt hours of electricity. We simply do not have enough energy nor will we be able to find this capacity in the near future. If say at worst we should run out of water completely like Beaufort West.  The average daily demand for water is 1.5 million cubic metres.  The amount of extra energy we would need to desalinate this volume of water would be a minimum of 6 million kilowatt hours every day, for the desalination process.  This water would need to be blended with some other water, most likely treated sewerage water for palatability, and pressurized to municipal pressure.  This would be expensive and with energy we simply won’t be able to find.  Until now all the supply water for Cape Town has been virgin raw water extracted from rivers.  The end to this luxury is nigh.

Water outages

Water outages are a blunt but absolute as an efficient demand management measure (to get people to use less water).  Will we have to endure water outages or wont we?

If everyone installed water saving devices as per the Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation, we would have no need for measures as tough as outages, but this is not the case. The steps of what can be done culminate in the following:  Install the Water Rhapsody Grand Opus to provide rainwater to the whole household.  This unique system receives rainwater from roofs but is also augmented with municipal water to give all households an emergency supply seamlessly. Water Rhapsody fix the emergency supply from the municipal to your water tank/s for an  emergency supply when, (not if) the Municipality turn off the water supply.  If you lived in Beaufort West and had installed the Water Rhapsody System, you would have a contiguous supply, and you would be unaffected by outages.  Secondly should you reduce your demand for water (without a change of lifestyle) you could reduce your water demand (usage) by half.  The reduction in demand is essential to get your precious saved rainwater to go so much further, and is done in five ways viz: by re-using grey water for irrigation purposes, or for toilet flushing, by re-using swimming pool backwash water and lastly by the use minimizing toilet flushing.

As restrictions bite, the municipality will quickly wake up to the erosion of their revenue, and will raise water rates.  These rates will represent the price of the next augmentation scheme, and the capital to provide enough energy for running the water augmentation, that is of course desalination.

All of these systems come at a cost, and the question is frequently asked, can we afford to install such systems?  Our answer is a rhetorical question: can we afford not to do these things?  Well the answer will be a resounding YES as soon as restrictions bite, and bite them surely will!”

Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor

Founder of Water Rhapsody.  Inventor of all the Water Rhapsody Systems.

2011-01-20

All low fruit of water has been harvested and exhausted.  There is not a single river that can possibly be damned in the country to augment supply.  There are no more augmentation schemes like we know to provide any more water.  Simply put 2010 sees South Africa on its last dregs of supply management as we know it.  The future is not rosy.

The future:

Worst hit will be the Reef.  Ground water will soon be polluted with Acid Mine Water which will enter the water table and erode buildings.  Rivers are being polluted with sewerage AMW, and it is not just the acid water that is so toxic to the rivers, but Cyanide, and radioactive substances including isotopes of Radon, Iridium and  Uranium.  The cocktail of these will make it impossible to use this water for anything whatsoever.  Worse still, is that this water will reach the drinking water of the Vaal system and make this water unusable too, soon, within 18 months!

There is not one single sewerage treatment works in the whole country that is able to process all of the sewerage effluent arriving in the pipelines to their works.  This means that raw, untreated effluent is flowing into every river around the country, and all over the country people are dying from drinking toxic water, in a septic state for us to drink!

Water outages have become the norm in many municipalities unable to cope with increasing demand.  Outages will come to Gauteng by 2013 and Cape Town perhaps sooner.

Cape Town is going into a drought cycle, from which they will only emerge in 3 years time, and will be out of water by 2012.  Though the city is way ahead in educational exposure of water matters, the city ignores rainwater harvesting and the water saving aspect of demand management as a tool to provide extra water for the City.

Places like Hartebeest Poort: this is simply an extension of a sewerage treatment works.  The water is toxic and even the municipality drawing on this water admit that they are unable to treat this water for potable purposes.  Worse is to follow.  The AMW has reached this body of water.  Rand Water is contracting to provide the diminishing water from the Vaal Dam at a staggering 200 million Rand to the area for drinking quality water.

The good news:  Enter Water Rhapsody from the wings:

Water Rhapsody will reduce demand for most if not all buildings by at least 50% and in some instances by 90%.  Water Rhapsody too will provide water safe to use in the house by harvesting water from roofs, and pumping under normal pressure to the whole household.  Furthermore Water Rhapsody with its proven conservation systems is able to reduce water demand to as low as 80 litres per person per day.  Country wide the current demand is 240 litres per person per day.  Water Rhapsody does this without getting the user to change his or her lifestyle in any way.  The resultant effluent from a user of the Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation is a fall in sewerage flow of 90%.  This reduction over a whole suburb would mean that any sewerage treatment works would be able to cope with the effluent volume, allowing water safe to drink running into our rivers.

Clearly Municipalities as well as Government must take notice that we have a disaster that is currently happening.  It is not if, or when this might happen, IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!!

The track record and technology for the Water Rhapsody Systems is proven without a single failure ever.  The systems have been built into the biggest companies and institutions including Old Mutual in Pinelands and UCT in Cape Town.

The Government and municipalities treat water as a commodity because they sell water for profit but we must never lose sight of the fact that water is a precious resource.

Lastly, though coastal regions are in a better position that inland cities, none of these cities have enough water.  The buzz words of using ground water and desalination of sea water are not sustainable.  The water for instance in the TMG (Table Mountain Group) aquifer is fossil water from millions of years ago, and be warned – there is a finite amount of water in the aquifer, and the recharge is perhaps thousands of years.  As for desalination of sea water – the energy cost of 4 kilowatt hours to desalinate sea water to make one kilolitre of potable water is simply not a cost effective way of providing water.  Take the smallest of the large dams supplying Cape Town –Steenbras Lower Dam contains 30 million kilolitres  of water which Cape Town would use up in less than 15 days.  It would cost Cape Town 120 million Kilowatt hours of power generation to provide the equivalent amount of water as this dam though the desalination process of Reverse Osmosis (RO).  Clearly this should not be considered as an option.  Cape Town is stressed enough for power supply, and there would not be enough power generation for this option.

Water Rhapsody encourages the  public to make use of their natural resources, not taking away of using more energy to try to create something out of existing resources. People must realize the effect of what we’re implementing now, on our future and those of the one’s we leave behind.

The Ndlambe Municipality has intervened to stave off an impending water disaster in Port Alfred by drastically reducing the pressure in supply pipes.

The decision was taken at a crisis meeting of the Ndlambe council yesterday morning, guided by municipal experts who have warned there is less than a month of drinking water left for the Sunshine Coast town, at the present rate of consumption. It was implemented immediately from yesterday midday, according to Communications manager Khulukile Mbolekwa. A team was also set to compiling a business plan to present to the government to support a plea for urgent funding for a new disalination plant.

The de-pressurisation measure has been implemented equally, across poor and affluent areas, in Port Alfred and adjoining Nelson Mandela Township, Mbolewa said. The town is an uneven area, with valleys and hills, and it is possible residents in the high-lying areas will be more challenged for supply. They will get water, but supply will be slow.

Port Alfred has only about seven days for drinking water left from its main source, the Sarel Hayward Dam, situated in the catchment above Bathurst. Besides this there is a holding dam that is still full, and it will give us the extra days for the total estimate of 15-20 days, perhaps more than a month. If it does not rain, even with the present restriction in place – after that we will have no water left. That is why we had to act.

The initial crisis plan was to cut water completely through certain periods of the day, but the authority realise this would be a mistake. The underground water supply pipe is very old, and to close the valve completely, then re-opening it again might result in the pipe breaking, not being able to handle the pressure. The Ndlambe Municipality hopes the depressure strategy will give them enough time to build a desalination plant in Port Alfred.

One such plant already exist which serves the the Ndlambe hamlets of Kenton and Bushmans, while Alexandria,  Boknes and Cannon Rocks have a back-up from a spring in the local dunes. Bathurst is being serve by borehole water but its dams are completely dry and it is in an even worse crisis than Port Alfred. So the plan is that the new desalinator will serve Port Alfred and Bathurst.

Mr. Mbolokwe said Ndlambe Municipality had not yet formulated a specific strategy as to how it would solve the onerous electricity demands of a desalinator but this detail would be specified in contractor submissions. “Water is a right, and we have to serve our customers. We understand the costs, but we need to solve this problem.”

 - Water Rhapsody are in the process of communicating with the Ndlambe Municipality, informing them of the advantages of Rainwater Harvesting, and Grey water Re-use for toilet flushing, for this might keep residents of Port Alfred from having to deal with  this water crises in there homes.

Water and sanitation director Barry Martin told a briefing yesterday Swartkops had been selected because of its location near the old power station which would allow the use of existing infrastructure.

He said environmental studies had been accessed and discussed. No problems were foreseen in that area.

A public participation process would now get under way and preliminary designs and specifications were being prepared.

The aim is to start work in October and complete the project in May next year.

Martin warned that dam levels could drop to 32% from the current 34% by next month, adding weight to suggestions at Tuesday’s Budget and Treasury Committee meeting that the punitive tariff for the consumption of more than 15 kilolitres a month is to be hiked by a “considerable” margin.

Presenting the metro’s drought emergency intervention plan, Martin said consumption had dropped from 283 megalitres a day to 250Ml. This meant the water supply would last longer.

But, he said, the past two years had been the “worst two consecutive years of low rainfall in known history”.

Sketching the actions that had been taken so far, Martin said interventions had started on March 8 this year.

The council gave approval for the declaration of the metro as a disaster area on March 25.

This was published in the provincial gazette on April 23.

This month the metro submitted an application for funding. It was now awaiting an amendment to the Division of Revenue Act that would release the R1,6-billion in funds required and allow projects to start in August.

As far as the weather forecast was concerned, Martin said the projection was for a 40% to 50% chance of below-normal rainfall in May, June and July. He said the metro drought plan included:

A campaign to reduce water consumption.

Maximising the supply from the Nooitgedacht Scheme.

Desalination of sea water at Swartkops.

Accessing groundwater supplies.

Water conservation at schools and at low-income housing units.

Accessing low-level storage in the Impofu Dam.

Promoting the use of rainwater tanks.

As far as the campaign to reduce consumption was concerned, he said an operational centre would be established at 0800205050 by June 1 with staff on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Additional staff were being recruited and a response turnaround strategy was being developed.

He said plans were also under way to test boreholes in several parts of the metro – those at Bushy Park could possibly yield 2Ml a day – while fast- tracking the Nooitgedacht Scheme would see completion brought forward to the end of next year.

The cost, Martin said, would be R650-million, while accessing groundwater supplies would cost a further R100-million.

The fast-tracking of the Nooitgedacht Scheme would start in September, he said, and be completed by the end of next year, while groundwater testing would start in September and be completed by March next year

The Herald

2010/05/21
Patrick Cull cullp@avusa.co.za

 - Why does it seem like desalination is the only solution munisipalities are grabbing at? At such a high cost……? Not cost effective! Rather make use of narural resources.