Weekly water use update 16 November 2017

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

What goes to your home/business and what goes from your home/business

Here at the Water Corporation we’re passionate about water and wastewater – naturally you might say it’s our job!  But we realise not everyone is as interested in the detail as we are.   So to help you understand the complexity of what we do without the information overload we’ve created a simple graphic.    The graphic provides a snapshot of what we supply to your homes/businesses and what we take from your homes/businesses across WA each year.

As you can see we deal with big numbers… for instance there are 52,702kms of water and wastewater pipes to maintain… Earth’s circumference is 40,075 km!

Water use

Our average daily water use last week was 962 million litres, which was above the forecast of 867 million litres per day.  Our financial year to date water use is 90.1 billion litres, which is slightly above the 89.9 billion litres we forecast.

Dam levels

Over the last seven days, Perth’s dam storage levels decreased 0.2 percentage points from 45.0% to 44.8%.  Perth’s dams store groundwater and desalinated seawater that is transferred from our treatment plants as well as streamflow (comes from rainfall).

Sprinkler roster compliance

The two-day-per week sprinkler roster now applies, and this week our inspectors issued 150 warnings and 162 fines in the metro region.  This is compared to 83 warnings and 116 fines the previous week.   Year-to-date we have taken a total of 8460 actions (warnings + fines) compared to 9439 actions for the same period in 2016.

Our inspectors have carried out an increasing number of actions in the suburb of Baldivis this week.   Please remember to stick to your two rostered watering days per week, and 10 minutes per station is usually about right for most sprinkler systems. 

Rainfall

The average monthly rainfall for November is 22.4mm.  So far this month, Perth has received 2.2mm of rainfall.  Since 1 January 2017, Perth has received 810.8mm of rainfall, which is less than the average of 833.5mm (January to November period).