Nelson Mandela Bay Metro has made an urgent appeal to residents in the Western suburbs to use water for essential purposes only.
This, as the largest resevoir, Chelsea, which supplies the Western suburbs, dropped to just six percent of capacity and could still run dry Tuesday.
The urgent appeal was made today by Mayoral committee member for Infrastructure and Engineering, Annette Lovemore.
"About two weeks ago we had numerous problems that affected our resevoirs on the Western side of the supply to Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. We had power cuts, we had various problems one on top of another resulting in our resevoirs, all of them on the Western side, sitting at about 30% of their normal capacity."
"We did put out a call widely for people to reduce usage, unfortunately that hasn't happened. The usage we hoped would be around 260 mega litres a day from the resevoirs has been consistenly around 310 mega litres a day. The result is that one our largest resevoirs the Chelsea resevoir, which serves the whole of the Western surburbs, Rowallan Park, Westering, Linton Grange, Hunters Retreat, Kabega Park etc is today sitting at around 6% of capacity," said Lovemore.
"We face the real risk of that running dry today," said Lovemore.
"So, we are putting out an urgent alert, particularly to people living in the Western suburbs to use water only for essential purpose. If you have to flush the toilet try and use it with saved bath water but really try not to do anything that is non-essential. If you need to wash your clothes leave it for next week. Really, only essential use is going to get us through this crisis."
"We are negotiating with the Dept of Water and Sanitation to get additional supply from the Kouga Dam, but because that also feeds the Gamtoos Valley it's actually unlikely. So, we really have to pressure residents to use as little as they possibly can for the next week to allow the situation to recover," said Lovemore.
