A beloved coastal city on the southern tip of Africa is months away from running out of fresh water.
Cape Town is rapidly draining its remaining freshwater resources, and soon its biggest dam, the Theewatersklooof, will be bone dry.
Some residents have started coming up with new ways to meet their water needs as the region struggles through its third year of drought. Many who can afford to do so have started digging private backyard wells. Others are carrying jugs to local breweries, where beer-makers have begun to share the spring water they normally use to make more potent drinks.
Those efforts seem to be working, at least a little. The city recently pushed back it's 'Day Zero' target from April to May, which means the roughly 4 million Capetonians will have another month of running water before the city's reservoirs get so low that most taps will be shut off. But the dams are still draining, and with no substantial rainfall in the forecast, time is running out.
This batch of aerial photos shows how the crisis has unfolded.
The Theewaterskloof dam is Cape Town's largest. In 2011, it was full of water and rimmed with greenery.
But by 2015, when the drought was getting underway, patches of land around the dam were beginning to brown.
NASA says just 325 millimeters of rain fell that year, much less than the 515 the area normally gets.
By 2016, annual rain totals were even lower than normal, and the shoreline of the dam was visibly receding on all sides.
That year, the region recorded 221 millimeters, less than half of what was expected. By 2017, the Cape Town airport recorded less than 160 mm of annual rain. Hydrologist Piotr Wolski from the University of Cape Town calculated that a two-year string of dryness this severe should only happen once every 1,150 years.
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