The good news is that the Mavrokolympos did not hold water for the local population's use. It was all destined for irrigation. This topic came up in our main site's forum. When the reservoir was built, the surrounding countryside was all farmland - mainly banana plantations and vineyards. These days, a lot of that land has had villas built on it, so there is less need for irrigation and more need for drinking water.

This also explains why the reservoir was 60% full. At the moment, during the winter, there isn't any need to use its water for irrigation, as the land is wet anyway. I asked Max, our resident weather expert, for data on the reservoir from a month ago, and he showed that back then it was only 40% full. So in the last month the level has risen by 20%. Compare that to other reservoirs, and you will see that most have less water than they did a month ago. This in itself is worrying, but hopefully the expected rain over the next few days will change that.

This also means, hopefully, that when the reservoir is fixed it will fill up again pretty rapidly.

There is still a fair amount of water flowing through it down to the ocean. You can see it in the water towards the horizon.

By the time we got to the reservoir to film it, most of the water had already flowed out. I imagine a few hours ago this was a lot more of a torrent.

It was only announced this morning that the reservoir needed to be emptied by Friday, and they have already pretty much achived that goal. Hopefully the fix can be applied quickly and the reservoir can be up and running again before the rains really hit. There were certainly a lot of people on site when we visited, so the problem is definitely being dealt with quickly.