The City of Windhoek (CoW) has cautioned residents to conserve water, warning that stricter measures will be implemented if usage continues unabated.
The Municipality said it will elevate to Category D which is a more stringent conserving measure if the situation does not improve.
Currently, the City implemented Category C which is a scarcity level, thus it requires residents to save at least 10% of water on a monthly basis.
The City’s latest weekly water watch, a monitoring tool to determine the consumption of water in the City for seven days, shows that residents have exceeded by 15%, an increase from 11% recorded in the preceding week.
“The Council in May 2023, declared Category C: water scarcity as per the classification of our water demand management plan developed in 2019. Where Windhoek residents are expected to save at least 10% of their water consumption per month.
“Since May 2023 to date, there has been no saving and we have not reached the target set in the water demand management plan,” CoW spokesperson Lydia Amutenya told The Brief.
“Therefore, it means if we continue to consume water at this rate, and provided that the three dams system serving the Central Area of Namibia does not receive sufficient flow, we are likely to run out of available surface water earlier than the two rainy seasons that was predicted after the outlook assessment by NamWater and the stakeholders in the Central Area of Namibia in 2023,” she warned.
The average dam water level in the Central Areas of Namibia stands at 24% compared to 46.3% in the last season.
The Swakoppoort Dam is at 41.6%, followed by the Von Bach Dam at 12% and the Omatako Dam at 1% full, thus these low water levels pose a serious threat to the central areas including Windhoek.
