Water cuts have been extended again since Monday in Mayotte. The 101st department is plagued by regular episodes of drought and rising consumption, announced the Mahorais water union and the prefecture.
Until now cut off for 26 consecutive hours every two days, tap water is now inaccessible for 30 hours, according to the schedule published by the Mahoraise Water Company (SMAE). Depending on the sector of the island, tap water will now be cut off for up to two and a half days per week.
The objective of these measures is to stem the increase in consumption estimated at 5% per year by State services, while the French archipelago is affected by record demographic growth and technical water cuts have multiplied in recent weeks. At the end of the dry season, which usually extends from April to November, catchments in rivers and underground drilling are less efficient, forcing over-use of the island's two artificial basins, currently full to 30 -40%.
In this context, “the reservoirs of the water purification units are emptying, which causes technical outages“, specified the prefecture of Mayotte. These have also multiplied in recent weeks, in Mamoudzou and in the north of the archipelago. “The extension of water cuts will allow reservoirs to fill and avoid these technical cuts“, underlines the prefecture.
On the night of November 11 to 12, a technical incident caused the shutdown of the Ourovéni water treatment plant, depriving half of the island's 321,000 inhabitants of water for more than 24 hours. On Thursday, the prefecture also published an order restricting the use of water. It is now forbidden to fill your swimming pool or wash your car outside of stations specially equipped for water recycling. Watering lawns and gardens is also prohibited from midnight to 6 p.m.
At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, tap water was cut off two days out of three to cope with an unprecedented drought. The late arrival of the rainy season, in January 2024, made it possible to gradually ease these restrictions, which were never completely lifted.
