One of Beaufort West's worst droughts

1915 · regional · Beaufort West

By March the town was short of water and hardened pepper trees were dying. Ratepayers could not pay their reservoir rents because there was nothing to irrigate with. In SEPTEMBER the council was told there was ONE DAY of drinking water left in the waterhouse. These are BEAUFORT WEST's records, about 91 km from the centre of the ground this project maps, and the article makes no statement about Klaarstroom or the Koup farms. What makes them worth having is that they are the same rainfall regime and the nearest place where somebody wrote the weather down year by year. Read as regional context, not as a record of what fell on these farms. [SRC-262]

Sources

• Wessel Visser, "Between drought and deluge: A history of water provision to Beaufort West, ca. 1858-1955", pp. 1-21 pp. 1-21; supplied as the PDF 31-61-1-SM.pdf