According to the city‚ De Lille is now personally contacting businesses and government departments to query them about their water usage.
"Where water use is inexplicably high‚ I am advising them to reduce their consumption immediately. This morning I personally contacted the heads of several major commercial consumers to inform them that their water consumption is extremely high and on a level that we can ill afford‚” said De Lille in a statement.
The move comes after the city’s dam levels dropped to 37.5% as water consumption was still at 8-million litres above the “800-million litre target for collective usage per day”.
This effectively means the water levels are at 27.5% as the city can’t use the last 10%.
On December 28 dam levels were at 48.1%.
“Many of them were shocked to learn how high their consumption actually is and immediately undertook to investigate the reasons for their excessive consumption and to implement water-saving measures‚” said De Lille.
De Lille said she urged users to work with the city and explained that “we can only save water while there is still water to be saved”.
“We need everyone to make urgent changes in their consumption behaviour during this critical time‚” she said.
The city said it will be issuing notices to some of its highest users‚ be it government‚ commercial businesses or domestic users.
It said‚ although the water usage was less than last week‚ too many consumers‚ including the commercial sector‚ were not playing their part and were placing “a huge strain on our diminishing water resources”.
Since the beginning of this year‚ the city has been sending numerous appeals in fear of running out of water due to low rainfall during the winter rainy season.
TMG Digital/TimesLIVE
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