Downpour injects 89 days of water supply into Cape Town dams

Cape Town's dam levels have leaped by an astonishing 8.6% as a result of Tuesday's downpour.

Runoff from catchment areas over the next days and weeks will boost them even further - and a lot more rain is forecast for the next two weeks.

On Wednesday, dam levels were measured at 69.6%, with a total of 624,755 megalitres in the city's six main storage dams.

This was almost 50,000 megalitres more than Monday's measurement. The increase in two days is 5.5 percentage points, or 8.6%.

At this time last year, as the first good winter rain in four years arrived, dams were at 56.3%.

Cape Town continues to peg water consumption at levels only just above what was achieved at the height of the "day zero" panic in the summer of 2017/2018, when dam levels plummeted towards 10%.

Last week, the city got through 557 million litres a day. At that rate, the increase in dam levels in the past two days will supply Cape Town for around 89 days.

Theewaterskloof, the biggest dam supplying Cape Town, was 60% full on Wednesday.

The main beneficiary of Tuesday's rain was the Berg River dam, which leaped from 85.7% full on Monday to 102.4% full on Wednesday.