You're making the point many have been making that long before now the city ought to have acted. In the video 'Cape of Storms' Helen Zille was recorded saying 'we're good in a crisis', but why wait until it got here? What do we prove by testing ourselves? I cannot understand it, except gross incompetence. 
It's not good enough, as she says elsewhere on this forum, the city's/province's hands were tied because a disaster wasn't declared in November 2015 when they requested it. That presupposes the city is unable to initiate plans on its own despite the constitution and act giving municipalities significant responsibility. 
It is 'a staggering failure of governance', and since province has an oversight and monitoring role, a staggering failure of Zille's administration too, which neither level, De Lille, who's in denial ('well-run cities don't run out of water'), nor Zille will acknowledge. Yet continuously they blame residents for not saving water and government for everything else.