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Running Dry

April 23, 2018
By Hailee Romain
GALLO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

DRIED OUT: Because of a lack of rainfall, Cape Town’s Theewaterskloof Dam is at a fraction of its normal capacity.

JIM MCMAHON/MAPMAN®

Cape Town, South Africa, is dangerously close to running out of water. The metropolitan area, which is about the size of Los Angeles, California, has been experiencing a severe drought for the past three years. As a result, the area hasn’t received enough rain to replenish the reservoirs—large reserves of fresh water—that serve its nearly 4 million residents. Despite recent restrictions on water usage, the reservoirs’ levels continue to fall.

LAST DROPS?

Theewaterskloof Dam is Cape Town’s largest reservoir. It provides the city with nearly half of its water. Since 2014, its volume of water has shrunk to just 13 percent of its total capacity.

JOSHUA STEVENS/NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY IMAGES, USING LANDSAT DATA FROM THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY & WATER LEVEL DATA FROM SOUTH AFRICA’S DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND SANITATION
MARJOLI PENTZ/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

COASTAL CITY: Cape Town sits along the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, seawater is undrinkable unless it goes through a pricey purification process.

Experts believe that droughts like the one in South Africa are becoming more and more common because of climate change. “Climate change makes weather unpredictable and more extreme,” says David Olivier, a water management researcher at the Global Change Institute in Cape Town.

If Cape Town runs out of water before its winter rainy season, officials will have to turn off the taps. Then people must line up at one of 200 collection points for containers of water. Each person will be limited to 25 liters (6.6 gallons) per day. That’s about 7 percent of what the average American uses.

BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

STOCKING UP: Residents of Cape Town line up at a public water spring to fill up plastic containers.

CUTTING BACK

SOURCE: CITY OF CAPE TOWN

City officials have mandated that Cape Town residents cut back their water usage to less than 50 liters (13.2 gallons) per day. This graph shows the amount of water consumed from all of Cape Town’s water reserves, starting when the new regulations went into effect on January 1, 2018. About how much less water was used on February 13 than on January 1?

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