It is a problem compounded by the fact that the town has been hit by a drought, leading to a sharp drop in water levels at its main storage dam.<\/p>\n
When we visited the area last week, Akkerkloof dam had just 20 days’ worth of reserves.<\/p>\n
But it is not clear when exactly “day zero” will hit as the authorities have stepped in with water restrictions and emergency funding.<\/p>\n
A retirement centre in Knysna has already experienced its version of “day zero” – when a fault at a local municipal plant left the elderly residents without any water for 10 days last October.<\/p>\n
This prompted owner, Franco de Grandis, to invest in a back-up water supply for the facility.<\/p>\n
“We need water in the apartments; we need water when people are bedridden in nappies. Without water, we cannot function,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
He has spent around 250,000 South African rand ($15,700; \u00a311,400) on the new operation, which includes three 10,000-litre water storage tanks and specialised pressure pumps to feed that water into some of main buildings, whenever there are water outages.<\/p>\n
“We had to make out own plan, I knew I couldn’t allow our residents to experience something like that again,” he said.<\/p>\n
Non-governmental organisations like Gift of the Givers have also stepped in to throw a lifeline to residents who cannot afford back-up measures.<\/p>\n
From privately dug boreholes, they bring thousands of litres of water in tankers almost daily to the town.<\/p>\n
“There is serious gratitude from the people when we arrive,” Gift of the Givers’ local co-ordinator Mario Ferreira told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“The disturbing thing is [that] the people start thinking this is the way of life and it shouldn’t be,” Ferreira added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a problem compounded by the fact that the town has been hit by a drought, leading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-409235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}