The South African city of Cape Town will slash residents’ water allowance to 50 litres a day from next month amid fears that it could become the world’s first major city to run out of water.<\/p>\n
The city had reached a “point of no return”, Mayor Patricia de Lille said.<\/p>\n
Cape Town, a popular tourist destination, has been hit by its worst drought in a century.<\/p>\n
Ms De Lille warned that the city risked reaching “Day Zero” on 21 April, when taps in homes could run dry.<\/p>\n
“We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them,” she said at a press conference.<\/p>\n
“Despite our urging for months, 60% of Capetonians are callously using more than 87 litres per day,” she added, referring to the current daily limit.<\/p>\n
A person uses about 15 litres per minute for a typical shower and the same amount when flushing a standard toilet, according to WaterWise, a South African water usage awareness campaign.<\/p>\n
Cape Town had earlier banned car washing and filling up swimming pools as part of efforts to conserve water.<\/p>\n
The Indian cricket team was also urged to take showers of no more than two minutes\u00a0during its tour of the city earlier this month.<\/p>\n
However, the measures would “simply not be enough” and the crisis had “reached a new severity necessitating a series of new emergency measures”, Ms De Lille said.<\/p>\n
Much of southern Africa has been recovering from a drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, following heavy summer rains.<\/p>\n
However, Cape Town is still gripped by a drought and has had very low rainfall for the last three years.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The South African city of Cape Town will slash residents’ water allowance to 50 litres a day from next month amid fears that it could become the world’s first major city to run out of water. The city had reached a “point of no return”, Mayor Patricia de Lille said. Cape Town, a popular tourist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":392785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=392779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/392785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=392779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=392779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=392779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}