A Little Less Water
17 Aug 2017Water Waste to Water, Less ?
This is a pseudo-follow-up post to A Point About Points.CapeTown is still in the midst of drought howbeit winter rains bringing some relief. As further mitigation, introducing Level 4b water restrictions from 1 July 2017, were each individual should use 87L per day. With this information all about I could not resist the itch to know where the water sources were in CapeTown, well, geographically that is. The Centre for Geographical Analysis at Stellenbosch University started a satellite image time-series of main dams supplying Cape Town with water. What a brilliant idea! But where were these 6 main (and 8 minor) water sources in the Western Cape? - I sought to answer that.
You can - Cut To The Chase!
Think Water, Find Dams
To get me started I got the Dam Names off the City of Cape Town’s Open Data Portal. Search term “dams” yields a csv file of Dam levels, (Dam levels update 2012-2017.csv). This listed all the 14 water supply sources, with storage capacities. I Googled the locations for these and had X, Y coordinates for these.
I planned on having a story map of sorts to help the ‘gazer’ have an idea where the water sources where. I settled for JackDougherty’s template on GitHub. This was particularly attractive because it had LeafletJS in the mix and some GeoJson. My mind was set on the map portion of this excellent visualisation which proved to be too complex to emulate. I also considered Odyssey.js which turned out to be unpolished and kinda project abandoned.
It didn’t take long to have the scrollable map-story for the dams. After following the instructions on the GitHub Repo and editing a few lines in Sublime Text.
Credits
The following sources were used for the Dams Narratives.
and the City of Cape Town website for dam capacities.