CPT Water Crisis: National government says it will help extract final 10% of dams

Day Zero is getting closer and closer and each dam report so far has brought with it the reminder that the last 10% of water in the dams is not useable. Well, the national Department of Water and Sanitation wants to help out the local government with using that last 10%

The Department’s Trevor Balzer took to Twitter this weekend to announce the plans. Balzer is responsible for the department’s drought-intervention programme.

“We are preparing ourselves to be able to extract the last 10 percent from the Voëlvlei and Theewaterskloof [dams], and our construction teams will be working in those dams from the end of January onwards, so [that] we can extract all the water from what is commonly called ‘dead storage’.”

HuffPostSA spoke to Dr Kevin Winter as a result of the news. Winter is an academic and lecturer associated with the Future Water Research Institute. He says it makes sense to find ways to get out as much of the water as possible.

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