Ration water as South East is ‘drier than Marrakesh’, customers told

Households person been told to ration their h2o usage due to the fact that the South East is drier than “Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul”.

Tim Mcmahon, the managing manager of Southern Water, claimed that the company’s hands were being forced, adding that customers would person to usage little h2o to debar aboriginal measure rises.

“If you look astatine the south-east of England, it’s drier than Sydney, Istanbul, Dallas, Marrakesh,” Mr Mcmahon told the BBC. “We person got a precise densely populated country and we request to commencement investing to cater for that.

“We request to trim customers’ usage. Otherwise we volition person to enactment different investments successful place, which volition not beryllium bully for our customers and mightiness not beryllium the champion happening for the environment.”

Southern Water said the wealth from terms hikes is needed to amended infrastructure due to the fact that the bulk of its h2o sources volition person to alteration successful the coming decades.

“We can’t support extracting from our existent sources,” Mr Mcmahon said. “Sixty per cent of them volition beryllium antithetic successful 20 years’ time. That’s wherever the concern is going.

“If you’re successful Hampshire, h2o volition beryllium coming from Oxfordshire from the caller reservoir we’re gathering with Thames Water, pumped each the mode down to Hampshire.”

According to the Met Office, the driest parts of south-east England get little rainfall than Sydney and Istanbul, portion American information suggests Dallas is besides wetter than the southbound east.

The forecaster’s information suggests that the driest parts of the South East get astir 20 inches of rainfall a year. It states that the mean yearly rainfall successful Sydney is conscionable implicit 48 inches a year, and Istanbul gets a small nether 24 inches of rainfall each year. Marrakech, connected the different hand, gets conscionable 9 inches of rainfall a year.

An American authorities website states that the mean yearly rainfall successful Dallas, Texas, is simply a small little than 35 inches a year.

Southern Water and Portsmouth Water are gathering the Havant Thicket reservoir successful Hampshire. This volition beryllium the UK’s archetypal caller reservoir successful 30 years.

Southern Water said it would beryllium capable to store 8.7 cardinal litres of water, providing up to 111 cardinal litres of h2o a time during a drought.

It besides plans to instrumentality h2o from a imaginable reservoir adjacent Abingdon successful Oxfordshire which has proved peculiarly controversial, with thousands of radical opposing the proposal.

The mean household successful the UK uses implicit 500 litres of h2o a day. A survey by Water UK recovered that 46 per cent of the British nationalist thought their household utilized conscionable 20 litres a day.