A clearer view
of Cape Town's water.
This is a small personal project — me playing with public data and trying to turn it into something the people who actually live with these dams can understand at a glance.
The official numbers are out there. They're published every week by the Department of Water and Sanitation, by the City of Cape Town, by satellites overhead. But they're scattered across PDFs and dense state-of-dams tables, and they don't quite tell you what they mean. This site tries to do that — without inventing or smoothing anything that isn't in the source.
What the dams are at right now
Live combined storage, per-dam levels, this-week consumption, and a 7-day rainfall outlook for each catchment.
A Day Zero scenario tool
1,000 Monte Carlo simulations against a decade of weekly readings. Drag the rainfall and consumption sliders and watch the probability curve respond.
Cape Town's New Water Programme
An honest visual look at desalination, water reuse, and groundwater — and whether the planned new supply will keep up with demand.
The dam that holds half the system
A satellite time-lapse of the largest dam in the WCWSS, from the depths of the 2018 drought through to today.
Where every number comes from
Every input, refresh cadence, and editorial judgement — for researchers, journalists, and sceptical readers.
I'm not a hydrologist or a journalist. I'm someone who lives in Cape Town, remembers 2018 vividly, and likes building things with data. This site is the result of that — a side project I keep adding to when the curiosity strikes.
The combined dam % is currently 47.3%. That number on its own doesn't tell you much. What is it relative to last year, the same week in 2018, or what we'd need going into summer? Most of the work here is contextual — putting numbers next to the comparisons that make them meaningful.
Nothing here is real-time and nothing is invented. Every figure traces back to a primary source, and where we don't know something we say so. The full methodology page documents the chain of custody from PDF to pixel.
Open data, open tools, no tracking, no ads. The site is a static build that reads JSON files committed by a daily scraper — no servers, no databases, just published numbers.
- · Astro · static site framework
- · React islands · only where interactivity needs them
- · Tailwind · styling
- · Zod · runtime schema validation on every JSON input
- · DWS · CCT · Open-Meteo · ESA · primary data
- · Netlify · hosting, with a deploy preview for every change