Water Wheel March/April 2023: Urban Water Management

Abstract

The increasingly harsh water restrictions in Cape Town over the year-and-a-half before early winter rains broke the three-year drought in 2018 raised the ire of local residents. Accusations of incompetence and some rather pie-in-the-sky solutions littered the comments section of online articles. Some of these bemoaned the fact that any little rain that did fall in the city was allowed to flow down stormwater channels and out to sea, rather than being captured by the municipal authority. By then, scientists and engineers from the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town (UCT) had already been investigating the potential of stormwater harvesting for a few years. One such study was Dr John Okedi’s WRC-funded research project, titled ‘The viability of stormwater ponds in the Zeekoe catchment as water resources for Cape Town’ , South Africa, for which he was awarded his PhD in 2019. The catchment has more than 60 stormwater ponds within its 89 km2 area, as well as three large but shallow lakes – Zeekoevlei, Rondevlei and Princess Vlei.

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