Metro weekly water update - data as at 9 March 2018

Note: 1 billion litres = approx. 400 Olympic swimming pools

Water use

Average daily water use last week was 984 million litres, which was below the forecast of 1013 million litres.  Our financial year to date water use is 197.9 billion litres, which is 8 billion litres below the 205.9 billion litres we had forecasted.

Dam levels

Over the last seven days, Perth’s dam storage levels dropped 0.4% to 40.6%.  Perth’s dams store water from three different sources… groundwater and desalinated seawater transferred from treatment plants as well as streamflow (produced by rainfall).

Sprinkler roster compliance

The two-day-per week sprinkler roster now applies, and our inspectors issued 121 warnings and 92 fines this week.  This calendar year we have taken a total of 2081 actions (warnings + fines) compared with 2298 actions for the same period in 2017.

Rainfall

So far this month Perth has received 0mm of rainfall – the March average is 19.5mm.  In 2018 we have received 106.4mm of rainfall, which is well above the year to date average of 41.7mm.

General water news

On Monday night’s ABC Four Corners program Water Corporation Chief Executive Officer Sue Murphy spoke about how climate change had affected water supplies in Perth.  If you missed the program you can watch it again online here – Sue’s interview starts at around 29 minutes.

The program points out that the weather has changed in Perth almost faster than anywhere else on the planet.  Reporter Michael Brissenden says that as the head of the WA Water Corporation Sue Murphy has had one of the most urgent climate mitigation jobs in the world.  Her city was literally running out of water.

In the interview Sue said: “the aquifers were falling, dams were empty, in 2001 we thought it was an aberration year, in 2002 it became clear it was more than an aberration year, and since then we have fast tracked really 30 years of planning into about 10 years of delivery”.

“What we are dealing with here is not drought… it’s long sustained change in the way our climate operates and that requires us to behave in a very different way. It’s not a short-term solution… it’s long-term behaviour change.  We’ve had to re-build Perth’s water supply using what we call climate independent sources… things like recycling and seawater desalination.”