Cape Town - The George Municipality has completed the installation of a temporary package plant to help the municipality cope with the increase in daily water demand during the peak season.
This as the Garden Route is on alert, with water sources such as the Garden Route Dam being affected by low rainfall, as well as issues with the production of treated drinking water.
The municipality said although the new package plant will add an extra 5 Ml/day of treated drinking water to daily production, there remained a high risk of not being able to meet the full daily demand for drinking water, which was why water restrictions would remain in place.
“The package plant is also intended to supplement the available treated drinking water in 2023 while various rehabilitation work is done at the Old and New Water Treatments Works, and availability of supply will remain constrained until the new 20Ml WTW capacity extension has been completed in 2025,” the municipality said.
It added that the Garden Route Dam volume had dropped to 45.8% last week, and although rainfall of 123mm was measured over the past seven days, the dam volume had only increased to 57.43%, as measured on Monday.
“At 57.43% the available volume is equal to approximately 165 days of raw water supply.”
The other problem lies with the production of treated drinking water the old water treatment works, circa 1950, is not producing drinking water at it’s original design capacity, and the Denneoord Water Treatment Works can currently produce 20Ml/ day provided this is not affected by the extended load shedding.
“Remedial work is planned at both the old water treatment works and the Denneoord Water Treatment Works to optimise the capacity.”
Head of disaster management at the Garden Route District Municipality (GRDM), Gerhard Otto, said fresh water run-off in the main water supply rivers supplying water to Knysna as well as Bitou had increased to the point that sea water intrusion into water abstraction points was currently no longer a concern.
“In addition to that the levels of all the major dams increased by between 8% and 10%. For the George municipal area this equates to water in storage for a period of five months, and at the current rate of abstraction this is about 37 million litres per day.
The ideal position would be to have at least another two to three months in storage, therefore although it was welcome rain we definitely need both follow-up rain as well as lower levels of load shedding before any lifting of water restrictions could be considered.”
Cape Times