Authorities meet to discuss water management

The Minister of Agriculture has called for an emergency meeting this week of all interested parties to discuss water cuts the government has announced.
“I have invited the heads of local water boards in the various districts with a view to explain the measures the government announced earlier this week,” Mihalis Polinikis, Minister of Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment has said.
Speaking in Paphos, on the western coast, the Minister noted that there are different views as to how these measures are to be applied and because of this all parties involved with water management have been asked to meet on Wednesday to clarify the situation.
“The government decision to reduce the quantity of water distributed to local water boards, to meet the continuing drought, is applied in exactly the same method to all water boards, including Paphos,” he stressed, adding that there has been a 30% cut in the supply of water to the water boards.
The Minister explained that it was up to the local water boards to decide how to proceed with the distribution of water to households and other installations and how to manage water cuts in general.
The Water Boards in the major cities, except Paphos, have imposed water cuts in a bid to save water, following the prolonged drought and the minimum amount of water in the country’s reservoirs. Households will have water for eight or twelve hours in the evening every two days, depending on how the local water boards decide to distribute water. Hospitals and some other installations are exempt from the water cuts.
An official press release describes the water situation in Cyprus as “tragic”, saying that flow to the reservoirs is “the minimal in the past 20 years.”
At the beginning of March last year water reserves stood at 134 cubic metres and on the same date this year reserves were only 70 cm. Today there are only 38 cm in the country’s dams.