Metro weekly water update as at 14 December 2017

Note: 1 billion litres = 1 Subiaco Oval filled to the goalposts

Rain expected – please turn off your sprinklers

Rain is forecast for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, which isn’t good news for the cricket but is good news for our gardens as they get a free drink from the sky. If Sunday, Monday or Tuesday is one of your allocated watering days, please don’t forget to turn off your garden sprinklers.

You might think turning off your sprinklers won’t save a lot of water but if everyone does this one small thing our total water use could be about half what we expect on a December day.   Access to clean, safe drinking water is one of the essentials in a liveable City.  With climate change fresh water is a limited resource so let’s join together to conserve it when we can.

Water use

Our average daily water use last week was 989 million litres, which was above the forecast of 983 million litres per day.  Our financial year to date water use is 116.4 billion litres, which is also slightly above the 116.2 billion litres we forecast.

Dam levels

Over the last seven days, Perth’s dam storage levels decreased 0.3 percentage points from 44.1% to 43.8%.  Perth’s dams store groundwater and desalinated seawater that is transferred from our treatment plants as well as streamflow (created by rainfall).

Sprinkler roster compliance

The two-day-per week sprinkler roster now applies, and this week our inspectors issued 136 warnings and 151 fines in the metro region.  This is compared to 114 warnings and 142 fines the previous week.   Year-to-date we have taken a total of 9,636 actions (warnings + fines) compared to 10,450 actions for the same period in 2016.

Rainfall

The average monthly rainfall for December is 13.1mm.  So far this month, Perth has received 7.4mm of rainfall.  Since 1 January 2017, Perth has received 820.80mm of rainfall, which is less than the average of 844.5mm (January to December period).