“The municipality has let out too much water, we need at least 5% back into the dam,” said Mr Stan Marsberg, a resident staying alongside the dam.
The lack of water in Witbank Dam is preventing the launching of boats into the dam, it is also believed to be negatively affecting both business and leisure alongside the dam, not to mention the amount of weeds that have begun sprouting up on the shore.
“If the flow believed to be coming into the dam was so heavy, then why is the dam at a lower level than what it was,” asked Marsberg.
Marsberg believes the dam level to be roughly at 73% now, which according to him is far too low, even though it is the rainy season.
On November 28 the municipality released a statement explaining the release of the water:
‘Statistically, the council needs to release 5.08 percent of the volume of the dam annually to comply with the requirements of the legislation. This is 6 030 cumecs of water (a cumec is a million litres).
‘The period the gate was opened allowed 72 hours of water to be released and this equates to 90% of the annual quota that needs to be released.
‘Over three days 5 443, 20 cumecs or 49 days of normal water consumption was released.
‘The total estimated capacity of the dam is 111 701 cumecs.’
“We have a constant inflow and with normal average rainfall we can expect the dam to slowly increase and we will aim to stabilise it on 98 percent before winter. Last year we had an abnormal high rainfall season and the gates had to be opened for protracted periods at various volumes,” said Mr Theo van Vuuren, municipal manager.
At peak the dam rose three times to 108 percent (its maximum capacity) and at one stage had all four sluice gates open. Two were open at 1.5 metre each and the other two at 1.2 metre each.
“Projections of the next period show that its unlikely that we will have the same high rainfall as last year but under normal circumstances, we should still see a few times where we have to open the sluice gates again, depending on the inflow,” continued Van Vuuren.
In response to this Marsberg questioned why the municipality did not wait for the flow to increase before releasing the water and instead pre-emptively emptied the dam.
