Water levels at dams supplying the Cape Town metropolitan area increased by 0.6 percent during the week to June 21 to 58.8 percent of total capacity, the city council said on Tuesday.

In its latest update, it said water consumption for the same period was up 15 million litres per day from the previous week at 665 million litres daily.

“It is encouraging to see dam levels continue the upward trend, with further showers predicted for later this week,” Cape Town member of the mayoral committee for water and waste Xanthea Limberg said.

“Dam levels should continue to rise throughout winter, after which point the city will reassess water restrictions. As things stand there is currently around a 50 percent chance that dams will be full by the end of winter, but we can’t count our chickens before they hatch.”

Cape Town is prone to a scarcity of potable water and rainfall patterns are always uncertain. In 2018 it narrowly avoided having its taps run out of potable water in what was referred to as “day zero”.

On Tuesday, Limberg said should rainfall be low this winter, the city council would make the appropriate decisions based on an assessment of the hydrological year which ends in November.

She said good progress was being made in developing new water sources, with the city on the verge of receiving first water from the Table Mountain Group Aquifer abstraction programme.

Around 15 million litres of groundwater water was currently on track to come online before the next summer period and ramp up thereafter, Limberg added.

Source: ANA