The following speech was delivered by City of Cape Town Executive Mayor, Patricia de Lille, at a visit to the Atlantis Aquifer Thursday, 2 November 2017.
Thank you all for being here today. I want to start by thanking Capetonians who have done really well so far with saving water.
About 50% of water users have restricted their daily usage to 87 litres per day but this is not enough and we need each and every Capetonian and business on board as a partner on this journey.
We are in an unprecedented drought crisis and this phase is critical because if the City and residents don’t do enough together and simultaneously, we will run out of water.
The City is doing everything in its power to ensure additional supply, including finding and hiring the country’s best team of experts who are working 80-hour weeks with the rest of us to ensure that we bring additional water online.
This plant we are visiting is one of several sites for alternative water sources which form part of our Water Resilience Plan.
The City of Cape Town has recently refurbished many of the boreholes around this West Coast area to increase the production of this plant.
These boreholes form part of the City’s unique Artificially Recharged Aquifer System and a lot of work has gone into ensuring an increase in the volume of water from this aquifer system.
Prior this work, this system was producing around four million litres of water per day.
We have now increased the yield from this aquifer by an additional five million litres per day.
The output from the borehole system here at Witzands and the one in Silwerstroom – not far from here, where refurbishment work has also been done – is now feeding nine million litres per day into the Atlantis supply system.
While this increase in yield has helped a great deal, we are working hard to further increase the supply from this aquifer system over the next few months.
This will allow Atlantis to become self-sufficient and not need the augmentation from the Voëlvlei pipeline, as has been the case for some years now.
The water is serving homes and industrial businesses in Atlantis, Mamre and Pella on the outskirts of the West Coast, which is quite a vast area and so the additional capacity will be welcomed.
This work demonstrates our commitment to addressing this current drought crisis. I repeat my commitment that I will not allow a well-run city to run out of water.
I made it clear over the weekend when we announced the site of a new desalination plant with the V&A Waterfront: we have a plan and we will supply water, but we need Team Cape Town to assist us.
If we all do our best – as partners – we will not run out of water.