The Great Kei municipality only has enough water for two more weeks.
Hundreds of residents and holidaymakers will have a dry festive season if a solution is not found. Water is already rationed to only four hours a day at Kei Mouth and Morgan Bay.
Last week the government declared the Eastern Cape to be in the middle of a heat wave and said dam levels were declining. The province’s water supply is sitting at 61.3%.
And according to figures given to the Dispatch on Thursday by the SA Weather Service, East London’s rainfall so far this year is 40% down on its average.
Noni Vuso, acting senior manager at ADM, Great Kei’s water authority, said the Cwili dam level was seriously depleted. Worst affected are Cwili township and Kei Mouth.
Vuso said the municipality was working around the clock to find possible solutions, but nothing was guaranteed.
She said they had implemented a “water-shedding” schedule. Water was only being supplied between 7am and 9am, and 7pm and 9pm.
Morgan Bay, with its two hotels, many holiday homes and a township, is also starting to run dry. “The municipality is pumping water across to Kei Mouth from Morgan Bay, and has installed a pump in Cwili dam at Kei Mouth to extract the remaining water, which is estimated to offer a two-week supply to communities there,” said Vuso.
“ADM has started looking into the restoration of a pumping system out of the Kei River, as well as the possibility of equipping a borehole to supplement the supply.”
Vuso urged communities to use water sparingly.
Residents and business owners who spoke to the Dispatch were anxious and upset.
At Cwili township, resident Ndalo Matshoba said the municipality had been slow to react. “They knew about this a while ago and the measures they are taking now seem to be afterthoughts. They could’ve taken them long before so that we did not feel the pinch.
“Now we spend our days without water only to get it for two hours in the evening, when we actually need it more during the day,” he said.
Matshoba said she needed water in the day for cleaning, laundry and sanitation.
Bushpig Events bar owners Michelle and Jacques Gunnings said the dry taps were bad for the popular sports pub and bar, and for overnight cabins.
“This is terrible for our business because we work a lot with water in the kitchen for cooking and our customers obviously need access to toilets. Without water, things are going to get very difficult,” said Jacques.
Michelle said they were relying on friends with water tanks.
The manager at Kei Mouth’s The Thatches holiday resort, Cheryl Houzet, said that upon hearing that water was running out, owner Annetjie Dewberry ordered three more 20,000-litre tanks to “save the situation”.
“Fortunately we have water tanks coming in to deliver water from East London and we have just spent R20,000 on water tanks and buckets for all our rooms, so guests can recycle their shower water to flush.
“We are fortunate, but there are other businesses who don’t have the kind of resources we do,” she said.
The Thatches, which already had three tanks, now has access to 120,000 litres of rainwater. Dewberry also owns three water bowser trucks.
The owner of Whispering Waves holiday establishment, Carol van den Berg, said they were used to droughts, but this was by the far the worst.
“It has never been this bad and we don’t know how we’re going to cope.
“Many of us business owners are anxious, especially when it comes to sanitation.
“Not all of us have resources to secure water for more than 1,000 guests, because that’s about how many people I host over a festive season,” she said.
In a statement last week, water & sanitation spokesperson Sputnik Ratau said overall dam water levels in the province had decreased to 61.3%.
The department reported that the Amathole water supply system supplying Buffalo City had lost 0.6%, from 73.6% to 73% over seven days last week. The Amathole system – which covers the eastern part of the province – includes the Nahoon, Wriggleswade and Laing dams.
The SA Weather Service spokesperson for the Eastern Cape, Garth Sampson, said on Thursday that Buffalo City’s rainfall this year so far totalled only 558mm, 363mm less than the metro’s annual average of 921mm. He said the city’s annual rainfall had been dropping since 2015, when 867mm fell.
In 2016, 715mm of rain fell and in 2017, 803mm.
Four years ago, in 2014, 928mm fell.
“This is a disastrous year (for East London) although not a record. The worst was 2009, with only 550mm.”
Sampson said the forecast did not look great for the runup to Christmas, with only 10mm to 20mm of rain expected in the next 10 days...