Plans to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to Cape Town will not work in the event of another Day Zero countdown for the city.
Also read: Iceberg proposal investigated by Water Commission
While this plan was floated during the 2015-2018 drought, it was prohibitively expensive to implement and proved unnecessary as water consumption was reduced and rain arrived.
However, a recent simulation conducted by a US scientist showed that had a 300-metre iceberg been towed from the Southern Ocean to Cape Town, it would lose 99% of its volume and only provide some 2.4 million litres of water.
This would only be enough to sustain the city for less than four minutes and at tremendous cost.
If residents of the city were limited to 25 litres per day, as proposed under the 2018 Day Zero plans to turn off water mains and set up collection points, the iceberg would provide fewer than 100,000 people with a single day’s worth of water.
A climate modeller from Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Alan Condron, believes that wrapping the iceberg around its waterline to reduce wave erosion would dramatically improve circumstances and would see some 4.5 billion litres arrive in the Mother City.
This would be enough for Capetonians to survive for three days.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the paper revives the idea amid the City warning of “a strong indication of a possible, but not confirmed, drought cycle developing or continuing from the record low rainfall levels between 2015-2017”.
The six major dams, 97.6% of the city’s needs, were 67.7% full on Monday, according to the City of Cape Town.
When the drought ended in 2018, all emergency desalination plants were decommissioned and removed, while the council formed an independent expert panel to advise on how to produce 300 million litres of water per day from a permanent desalination plant and a water reuse project by 2021.
Council has also set aside R4.7 billion for projects that will extract 105 million litres of groundwater per day by 2036.
Since 2020, the Table Mountain Group aquifer has been flowing from seven boreholes into Steenbras Dam, and more are being drilled.
Progress is also being made on the Cape Flats aquifer.
Also read:
Picture: Pexels
