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Will Cape Town be the First City To Run Out of Water? (bbc.com)
Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But soon it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water. From a report: Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population. The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes. Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned.
But it's not fun either.
Plenty of Caribbean islands get water solely through desalination. The ABC islands come to mind
The obvious solution is to just drink beer.
they were surrounded with it. Amazing what can happen in a few short years.
My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month and the bill is around $27. Yet a family of 3 tenants at our rental consistently use 10K+ for a bill over $100. I can't figure out how they can possibly use so much; wtf people?
What a.... shithole. Looks like Trump it right yet again.
No, this isn't related to "climate change", it's simply corruption and maladministration. Here's an interesting graph showing similar conditions 10 years ago.
South Africa sure is a bastion of paradise since the government change in 1991.
If you are going to run out of water in 3 months at the current rate and you don't have the time or money to build desalination
plants fast enough then the obvious solution is to raise the price of water so that you have the time/money to fix the problem.
With the time gained from reduced consumption and the money gained from charging more for the water, this is an easily
solvable problem for a city that sits on the ocean with an unlimited supply of water they can desalinate.
There are also desalination plants built on barges that could be rented/purchased and moved there as a temporary solution.
They may be the first city in the world to have water prices be 100% market driven, and those that cannot afford the price may either die from thirst or move. There will be water to be had, but almost certainly not at the current prices.
South Africa is divided into provinces. Cape Town is in the Western Cape province and was the first major city run by the national opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. The province itself followed, and is also governed by the DA, for some years now.
The national government and all other major cities, towns and provinces have been run by the national ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), since freedom.
So you may assume that the DA has screwed up, letting the city and province run out of water, while the ANC has got things sorted elsewhere? Well, you would be wrong.
The neighboring Eastern Cape province is an overwhelming majority ANC stronghold. But by every measure it is a dismal failure - jobs, healthcare, life expectancy, education, housing, infrastructure, etc.
So people in the Eastern Cape vote for the ANC, but their feet vote to take them to the Western Cape, and in particular, Cape Town. There their kids will be educated, there is economic growth, jobs, housing and things generally work - not a paradise, but much better from their perspective.
This inrush of millions of peasants has overwhelmed the Cape Town infrastructure and ability to provide for them. The city and the province and trying hard, but even the DA is not perfect.
One final observation: Water supply is constitutionally a national responsibility, not local or provincial. Hence parliament and the national executive must account. And national government is firmly in the hands of the ANC.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Aren't there areas of California that have, at times needed to have water imported by truck?
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
They are running out of white people. Seems like whites don't like to live in the midst of primitive violent jungle savages.
Not sure how popular golf courses are in South Africa. Golf courses in California tend to get exempt from water restrictions. It takes a lot of water to keep those golf courses lush and green during droughts.
That's a slap in the face if true. Common man gets slapped with water restrictions but wealthy man gets lush watered grass to play his rich man sport on.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I mean it's been a while since this site was relevant, but news about drinking water in a city in South Africa surely doesn't count as news for nerds, considering I can read this in better places with real journalism. I don't need a referrer to the BBC.
One editor in particular has a knack for irrelevant stories with a British taint, but still what year was it evident that slashdot finally lost it?
If it had a technical or scientific bent: How to solve water issues? Could be news for nerds. Regardless, it is news that matters. A major city running out of water matters.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's already happened in California.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/water-and-power-a-california-heist/
This surprises you? Really? How?
I see they placed a ban on washing cars, but I thought almost all of the commercial car washes recycled their water already? Unless you're only banning people washing them at home using a hose -- this doesn't seem like it will accomplish much?
It's a Shithole
Quite popular. Plus its close to their wine producing region
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
and the jail will have free water!
Man has known that the earth is round since at least the 6th century BC. It's circumference was calculated to within the margin of error of the method used in the 3rd century BC. If you think the earth is flat, please explain why a sailing ship disappears over the horizon as it sails away from a person? Not only does it disappear, but the lower parts become obscured by the horizon first.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I haven't checked recently but I used to play golf a couple of times a week. It was, at the time, not the rich man's sport. Skiing was the rich man's sport - costing nearly 4 times as much. Has that changed in the last 20 years?
They wisely smashed up all that infrastructure that white people built and are now coming hat in hand asking for us to save them
I believe Southern California (LA, San Diego) never had enough water. They get their water piped in from Colorado.
Exponential growth makes it more drastic than you think.
Lets say you have a city with 1 million people, your current water sources can supply 3 million people, the population doubles every 5 years, and it takes 10 years to plan and construct a desalination plant that can supply water to 1 million people.
When do you need to start building and planning a desalination plant? Right now. By the time the plant is finished, the population will be 4 million and the city will be 1 million people over capacity.
The kicker is when do you need to build another one? Next year, and every year for the next 5 years.. at which point you start needing two a year.
Temporary barges and free market solutions will not be able to cope with the realities of exponential growth. By the time the market signals there is more demand for water, its already too late.
Are we now actually attempting to post evidence for the fact that the earth is not flat? Oy Gevalt!
How very Marie Antoinette of you - "Let them eat cake!"
Raising the price of water doesn't reduce the need for water to live.
Ken
what the fuck are you publishing here?
when did this place turn into nat-geo.
Quit choking on somones dick and try to produce some worthwhile as it relates to the topic promoted by this place.
news about drinking water in a city in South Africa surely doesn't count as news for nerds,
I find water infrastructure pretty interesting; it doesn't get much nerdier than that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
this is soo stoopid. If there is nothing relevant, or your head is up your ass (or someone elses) so far that you cant develop anything.
Dont fucking publish,
it clearly shows how fucking lame you and your editorial staff are.
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The water companies running the resevoirs in the North had sold all their water south to LA because of better rates, rather than retaining enough to service the expected needs of the Northern population. This has been a big problem in California for going on 20-30 years. Basically the entire canal system here gets used for funnelling NorCal water to Los Angeles, where they use it to keep their lawns pretty, or to southern farms in preference to northern ones, because they can pay more. The result is the southern half of the state being lazy about building the infrastructure they need to produce their own water (whether desal plants, large scale solar distillation, or other solutions) and instead pay more for northern water, which prices the local markets out, despite the local markets being on drought watch for 20+ years, meaning no watering lawns most of the week, expensive water, and water quotas based on seniority/water rights for many northern farms.) Hell, nowadays NorCal even has water meters everywhere, despite conservation efforts having lead to reduced water consumption, which caused the meters to be a huge financial sink, leading to rate increases when it was discovered the successful conservation caused a profit shortfall that would cover neither the meters or the ongoing costs of the local water districts.
California really does need to be split into 2 or 3 states, because as a single state it really has too many competing interests.
Actually, I was pointing out that the idea that the earth is flat is a modern idea and the idea that it is round is the default belief throughout recorded history.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
File it under stuff that matters.
Why news for nerds *and* stuff that matters? Because nerds knowing about stuff that matters is a very good thing. Nerds matter, today more than ever.
There was a time not so long ago that every major city had multiple daily newspapers (sometimes with morning and evening editions), and at least one paper in every city had a science desk. The reporters in the science desk would put out a weekly science section, but their real purpose was to provide science and tech background to stories like the one we're talking about.
Those people are largely gone now. All the world has is *us*, god help it.
You complain there isn't enough of a science or technology slant on the story? What do you expect? News gets reported by people who probably couldn't define "molecule" or explain "entropy" if their life depended on it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How economically illiterate of you. Lowering the price of water does nothing to increase the supply. Quite the opposite, really.
Lets say you have a city with 1 million people, your current water sources can supply 3 million people, the population doubles every 5 years, and it takes 10 years to plan and construct a desalination plant that can supply water to 1 million people.
Temporary barges and free market solutions will not be able to cope with the realities of exponential growth. By the time the market signals there is more demand for water, its already too late.
Sure it can. The human population doesn't reproduce that fast. Those people are coming from some where. If the water becomes too scarce or too expensive then the people will stop coming and/or move to where they can get water. What you don't want to happen is for the water to stop then people don't have time to make the necessary move but if the price of water is also increasing exponentially and doubling every month then that will naturally cause the population to stop increasing exponentially. Even without desalination plants, there are solutions. Lots of people live in situations where water must be carried long distances. It would be highly inconvenient but individuals could walk to the ocean, get water, carry it back to their apartment, boil it, and produce clean drinking water.
If moronic environmentalists would let us build pipelines and desalination plants there would be never be a water crisis anywhere.
Generally speaking everyone, everywhere is drinking treated sewage from all the cities upstream anyway, so what's the problem with just pumping your own treated sewage back up to the purification plant and reusing it a few times in the same city before flushing it down the river to the next one?
Greywater is of course also a wonderful solution - why bother making water potable first if you're just going to wash/flush/etc. with it? I've even heard some cities have greywater systems running parallel to the potable water systems, so purifaction plants don't have to work as hard, and your greywater consumption isn't limited to your own production.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How very Marie Antoinette of you - "Let them eat cake!"
Raising the price of water doesn't reduce the need for water to live.
You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive. You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
The alternative to raising the price of water now is to just wait until it's all gone in 3 months and then everybody dies. Personally, I would rather pay $10 per gallon for water now than die in 3 months. Likely, if water was $10 per gallon then people would start moving elsewhere which would buy even more time.
Desalination is a problem for large-scale use; it's highly energy intensive, and you're left with hypersaline brine, which is environmentally destructive.
All true though running out of water is a rather more acute problem than energy use or toxic byproducts.
Highly-energy intensive, compared to what?
Compared to pretty much every other commonly used method of getting fresh water. Hard to compete with simply pumping it from a freshwater lake/river or from an aquifer for cost. Even aqueducts and reservoirs take a lot less energy to manage.
A typical desktop PC can consume 125 watts average power consumption, so less than a day of the PC sitting there turned on can provide a cubic meter (264 gallons).
Apples to oranges my friend. Pumping ground water takes FAR less energy.
Don't respond to this guy. He spammed slashdot for months and told everyone if they don't like it then complaint to management. He also says that moving to mexico to marry an "underage sweet thing" is how you get "the most bang from your retirement dollar"
Make the first 19 gallons per person free or very low cost to give everyone enough water for their daily drinking and sanitation needs. Then price each additional gallon at whatever rate will stabilize reservoir levels: when levels are low, raise the price, and when levels are high, lower the price. Check the reservoir levels and re-price the water every few months to avoid overcharging water customers while preventing the water from running out. As new desalination plants and other sources of potable water financed by the high water rates come online, and as residents move to places with cheaper water, the prices will naturally drop.
Meanwhile, it only costs about 10-20 cents per gallon to truck water in, so I don't see $10 per gallon rates ever happening.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Don't attempt to engage creimer in legitimate discussion.
I would pay good money to see you walk to the ocean with a 1 gallon jug, fill it with water, bring it to any stove you like, boil it for as long as you like and then drink 1/8th of that "clean drinking water". After you have done that you can explain how boiling water removes the salt.
By equipment, golf is less expensive than skiing. What makes them rich people sports is accessibility to places where you can play. Golf is much more accessible with public courses with cheap green fees. However there are still private courses which you have to pay a membership to access as well as golf courses with high greens fees that don't require membership.
Skiing is a rich man sport in the same sense and it's worse than golf. There's capital investment necessary for a ski lodge plus the equipment to enable people to ski down the slopes. This makes it a lot easier to charge higher rates for access than even with golf.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Typical conservative. No compassion, no empathy, no heart. If it does not affect them or a member of their family directly, then it is irrelevant and does not matter.
This is the fundamentaly defining characteristic of the conservative mindset. No heart. If you take that into account, then everything they do, every value they uphold, everything they say suddenly makes perfect sense. Like calling liberals "bleeding hearts" or "snowflakes", their hatred of taxes, gun laws, any laws actually, their hatred of any form of regulation or governement, their valuation of individuals rights more than anything else, their total disinterest in any other culture, or in learning other languages, or in travelling.
You want a slap in the face? I live in CO, the source of the CO river which provides most of the water to southern CA. I pay more for water than people in southern CA do.
You boil the water in an enclosure or over a sheet of metal or glass and collect the condensate as it drips â" that should be obvious. Anyway, there are much cheaper and better ways to desalinate water though. For african villagers i bet the cheapest to setup/make is a solar still .. you just need some clear plastic and a cup (and the sun). Thats if they dont want to pool money together to buy or maintain a reverse osmosis system which btw is cheap nowadays even for household use. We have a system like that in my lab that if I recall correctly cost only around $500 (filters have to be changed periodically though).
Without showering, diseases will spread like hell. You need 19 gallons. One gallon to drink, the rest for showering, and keeping a clean house. What good is a tank of saved water if the plague gets you?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Build nuclear powered desalination barges.
2. Tow them to wherever there's a drought.
3. Profit?
There are a LOT of abandoned cities in the middle east and the america's which predate this.
Problem is more that as a species we have very short memories. Admitted possibly helped along by the lack of survivors.
No one there matters, aside from those penguins.
I'm not sure I understand this story.
Another Communist paradise, ever since the revolution.
So you think not raising the price of water and having people dying of dehydration in 3 months is better?
Yours is an all too-common error in reasoning - comparison to a nonexistent alternative. The alternative here isn't everyone has water to drink for as long as they want as you erroneously assume. The alternative here is they run out of water in 3 months, at which point people start dying of thirst. If raising the price of water can stave off that scenario, then it's an improvement. If you can't offer an alternative solution which doesn't involve raising prices, then the "solution" you're voting for is people start dying of thirst in 3 months.
Money is simply a representation of productivity. If not enough potable water is available, then you've got only two choices - increase the cost of water, or decrease consumption of water. The latter may not be possible if the population is growing. If reducing consumption is not possible, then clearly more productivity needs to be shifted into acquiring or generating more water. And that productivity shift will show up as more money being spent on water (be it acquisition or production), thus increasing its price (assuming the system has been operating rationally by acquiring the cheapest water first). If you're concerned about the poor being unable to afford higher-priced water, then you work out some sort of ration allowance system or water purchase assistance subsidy. But these do not alter the fundamental problem that water is currently priced too low for the amount of demand, and must be priced higher in order to increase supply to meet demand. Insisting that prices not increase breaks the economy, and will result in people dying of thirst.
Do you honestly believe that if everybody doesn't get an 18 gallon shower every day that we're all going to die?
There's absolutely no water savings to be had below 19 gallons?
Not only are they more enjoyable, but they conserve water. Give me a bucket, a rag, and a steam shower, and I can bathe with a couple gallons of water. Easily under 5. Also, I bathe about once a week, so that's 1 gallon a day. Granted I live in US, by the great lakes, so I'm fine anyway, but just sayin... not to mention the ladies love the musk. ;)
If the Earth is flat, then why do I live near a hill?
How very Marie Antoinette of you - "Let them eat cake!"
Are you aware that the cake in that story is simply white bread? (Ok. It's brioche instead.) But that does not change it that much. Except that Brioche is not cake.
Typical liberal. Claims the moral highground while talking about compassion, empathy, and heart. In the meantime they take no action to help anyone, change anything, or make any personal effort to relieve the problem.
This is the fundamentally defining characteristic of the liberal mindset. No action. If you take than into account, then everything they do, every vaule they espouse, everything they say suddenly makes perfect sense. Like calling conservatives "Nazis" or "bigots", their hatred of profits, self-defese, any personal freedoms actually, their love of every form of regulation or government, their valuation of social rights over individual freedoms, their total disinterest in history, personally working to make change, or spending their own money to help. It's so much easier to tax others to fix thier problems.
What good is a tank of saved water if the plague gets you?
To take the stance of people I have spoken with (once, and never again):
In the long run, that's 8,000 more tanks of water for a more sustainable future, just from one person's obedience.
It's true, "boil it, and produce clean drinking water" is much simpler and more accurate than "distill it to produce clean drinking water". On top of that there is no context at all for boiling water from a tap or surface water as a method of making it safe to consume. Nobody in desperate situations would ever make the mistake of thinking 'kill the bad things by boiling them' and 'remove minerals that are dangerous' are interchangeable operations. I'm not suggesting there aren't methods - I'm just saying merely boiling seawater doesn't make it clean drinking water and I want to see someone that thinks that it does produce clean drinking water put their mouth where their mouth is.
and fucking CONgress does NOTHING.
Here in COlorado, we depend on our snow melt which is way down. Problem is, that other states also depend on OUR water. The worse is southern California which draws a great deal more than they should be, which is causing the 2 reservoirs to drop fast.
I have written to my 3 critters and pushed them to create a bill that basically says that all communities within 50-200 miles of the oceans have to use desalinated water, and not to take from upstream rivers. With that, it would allow a number of rivers to come back, while recharging the ground water as well.
Ideally, we would fire up a program for nuclear SMRs, that also used the waste heat for desalination. This would encourage states to use excess heat to solve a major issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Go back to sucking on the kock bros and the rest of the fascists. At least you will have a good use for your mouth and hands because right now, they are fucking worthless since all they do is prove that you are a total idiot.
Why do you persist in slandering Marie Antoinette? You've been told before that this is a false attribution. Why don't you look up quotes before attributing them? Is your whole life and all your "knowledge" just a big game of telephone where you believe everything your friends claims to have "read?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1) It was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when Marie Antoinette was 9 years old
2) He doesn't attribute it to her at all, but to some unnamed princess
3) His actual context was that he stole a bottle of wine and felt he was too well-dressed to enter a bakery to buy bread to eat with it, so he bought brioche from a fancier store instead.
Only if they're so stupid that they stop washing their hands and save all up all their washing water for a silly shower.
Handwashing before preparing food is important for sanitation; showers are not.
"Raise the price" indeed. You DO realize that over 80% of the population there subsist on US $2 a day or less? Not every place on earth is California or New York. Different conditions exist outside of your little bubble.
Don't know where you get this idea, but it isn't true. The default cosmology of every civilization except ours is Flat Earth.
As far as I know, the golf courses are not exempt (no other sports facilities are exempt, and the city has closed most public pools and many schools have closed theirs too).
However, a number of golf courses (including the one near my house) have either access to bore-hole/well water, or have some storage dams of untreated rain water, that they use just to try and keep the grass from dying entirely on the fairways and prevent the greens turning yellow.
If your left, you will see that the article is about how the evil white people subjugated the black people so that they don't have any water. If you are right, you will see that the article is all about how the evil lefties ruined South African and can't supply water to their people. Obviously there some affirmative action is involved somehow.
Now is the time to get in the fight and either call the Republicans racist Nazis, or the Democrats dumb snowflakes who live in their mothers basement. Whatever side you are on, it is certain that the internet needs your definitive analysis.
Posts that don't involve name calling or canned political talking points will be modded down and deleted.
You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive.
Ideally, we would like to keep some semblance of an economy, so that people also have food to eat, can pay their rent or home loan etc. If they aren't to buy food, then they would need water to grow crops ...
You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
At the moment, I believe the plan is that when there is less than 13.5% water that can be used from the dams (e.g. at the 23.5% level, assuming that it is challenging to extract the last 10% due to silt etc.), they will start water rationing of 25l per person per day, and no homes will have running water (in taps), but have to collect water in person.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
Solely relying on price just means that the ultra-rich will continue to waste water, even if it costs them $500/month, because they don't feel it. I think they could raise the prices a bit, as that may provide some small motivation to the middle class to save more. However, they are preventing abuse; households that use more than 10.5kl have to pay for the installation of a water demand management device that limits their household water consumption to ~330l/day (unused can accumulate) and 10.5kl/month (unused can't accumulate/roll over to the next month). In order to raise funds for the desalination plant that is being built, the city has proposed a drought levy (based on property value) to be added to normal municipal levies/rates/taxes.
I see no reason to believe a theory about the earth which was invented in the 19th century and then attributed to ignorant people from the past.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Invented in the 19th century? You're wrong on history.
By your reasoning, Einstein's theories should be ignored because they were invented in the 20th century. (Ooops, bad example. His theories are trash.)
Remember that towing glaciers to Dubai business?
https://nypost.com/2017/05/17/...
Antarctica is much closer to Cape Town than Dubai is.
their valuation of social rights over individual freedoms
And proud of it.
You know what you call a human cell that does what it's supposed to do, performing the task it's assigned, sometimes even sacrificing itself for the greater good of the whole organism ? A healthy cell.
You know what you call a human cell that reproduces however and whenever it wants to, that values its own survival more than anything else, that takes whatever resources it needs and dumps its garbage for the rest of the organism to deal with ? A cancer cell.
Conservatives still think and act like our cave-dwelling ancesters. like before the advent of civilization. They are tribal, primitive. They act like in the times when the only life on earth was single-cell organisms.
Liberals act like evolved, civilized human beings. They reject exploitation of the weak by the strong, they reject the principle of "might makes right" so dear to conservatives. They live by the principle that a society that doesn't benefit everyone is not a civilized society. They accept that other people's problems are also their problem, and unlike what you think, they actually learn from history, because without them, there would be no history, because conservatives, who hate change almost as much as taxes, would still have us living in caves and loosing two or three fingers and toes to frostbite every winter.
It is clear by your weak attempt at rhetoric that you only speak a single language, that you've never travelled far from where you were born, that you don't actually know any liberals, and that your opinion of them is forged mostly from what you heard and read from right-leaning media and people.
So continue to believe what you want to believe, Ignorance is bliss. I'll tell you one thing however: It wasn't liberals who elected as their president the conservative equivalent of Harvey Weinstein.
Use seperate seawater lines for non-potable water use... Washroom sink, toilet and shower. Only half the plumbing needs to be redone in plastic... The drainage side stays as is. Maybe start with government built or funded buildings.
Maybe skip washroom sink (for safety; gets ingested during toothbrushing).
That's what they get for kicking out, making homeless, and even murdering the white farmers. Fuck em.
Water from my showers, toilet, washing, whatever, that goes down the drain goes into my city water treatment plant. From there, it is cleaned and put back in the local river. It could be further cleaned and re-used for drinking/household re-borrowing.
So household use doesn't actually USE any water from the local environment that isn't returned. I borrow it and recycle it.
Landscape use (watering plants) does, however, USE water. It evaporates and isn't really recyclable for local use.
Household water use therefore need not be a drain on water resources. Landscape use pretty much is a drain.
--PeterM
Yes, you personally. ... not sure if that works.
However rising the price of water above the price of beer
Then again people need to flush the toilet.
And then again, last time I checked, but I might be wrong, a gallon is 2.6 liters. So in a climate like Cape Town a person needs about 3 gallons. In a random german city people already are supposed to drink about 2 gallons per day.
And then again, 1 gallon per day for $10 is $300 per month, and you have neither washed, showered or flushed the toilett for that price.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Welcome to the black market of water trade: "Suk! Suk!"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
South Afrika is a first worl country.
No one is or will be dying of thirst there.
How stupid are you?
But thanx for your brain dead suggestions.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It would be highly inconvenient but individuals could walk to the ocean, get water, carry it back to their apartment, boil it, and produce clean drinking water.
Seriously?
No comment ... facepalm.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can't imagine that 80% of the population subsists on $2 a day or less, but 75% has a television. Better to raise the price and let those who most value it buy it than to have a price that fails to convey the information that prices are supposed to convey -- in this case, that they should use less water.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
With nearly 300 comments already, I'm not sure there's a point in posting, but...
Los Angeles ran out of water decades ago. Or they would have if they hadn't built aqueducts to bring water from Mono Lake and the Colorado River.
Santa Barbara nearly ran out of water. They started to build a desalinization plant. Then one rain storm refilled their primary source of water. They cancelled the plant and sold the equipment to one of the dunes countries IIRC.
The real question should be why did Cape Town wait so long to start dealing with it?
We live near Lake Ontario where our municipal water supply comes from. Nice long hot showers, greener than green grass in the summer from our sprinkler system...
Yet everyone wants to live in southwest US where water is running out.
Go figure.
As a South African we have a saying: That's Africa Baby.
We encountered / encounter similar issues with electricity - The (useless) ANC national government didn't build power stations for 20 years despite being warned, and this caused us to run out of electricity in 2008. We had 'loadshedding' with 4 hour power outages a day. It's better now, but the national power utility (love Marxism) is basically out of money.
Neighbouring Zimbabwe is a better blueprint. They never built any power stations after independence (but execs bought new Mercs every year at their state utility), and their capital had/ has 20 hour power cuts a day.
Trump is spot on. Post liberation Africa is a shithole. It's not genetic, it's cultural. Willing to accept zero standards (president Zuma has a grade 3 education). Not planning for the future. Culture of victimhood.
The west should give white south Africans citizenship in Europe, where we came from. I'm sure African Americans will be more than happy to take our place in this paradise.
What will the effect be on penguins that run into the brine from the desalination plant? I fear it would be deadly for the poor little critters. What's worse, making the people drink bottled water until it rains, or killing penguins?
15 years ago I went on holiday to Senegal and met a local girl. Her shower was a circle of poles 1,5 meter high, with 1 bucket of water and a 1 liter can, out in the sun on some stone slabs. 1 can gets you wet, you soap up, and then 2 cans rinse it off. Stand around naked drying in the sun.
One funny fact was that the dutch nurses who helped at the local hospital were much taller than the Senegal women (and the poles around the shower area), so they got a lot of attention when they went showering.
A pretty secretary walks past a few business men at the coffee machine. She asks one of the men "Do you shower after you had sex?"
Taken off-guard by this out-of-place question he says "Yes, of course. Why?".
She replies "Then it's about time you had some sex..."
I built my house in the Netherlands 24 years ago with a rainwater collection system: 2 filters in the pipes of the largest roofs, and a 10 m3 concrete water container. I use the water for flushing the toilets, the washing machine and occasionally the garden. Although it has drinking water supplementation it very rarely runs dry, it's usually a signal for me to clean the water filters in the rain pipes.
My year water utilities usage for 2017 was 18 m^3, which is 49 liters per day, for daily showering, weekly dishwasher, daily kitchen use and drinking. The average dutch water usage for one-person household is 52 m^3, which is 142 liter per day. 65% of my water consumption is done with rainwater.
Even when it does no longer rains as much in CapeTown, any water you collect is saved drinking water, and also does not burden the sewage system at the time of the rain.
What are your solutions? Making a 20 km round trip carrying buckets of water to boil it in a still, or becoming a refugee. Sad.
The problem is that there are already too many people by the time the price of water changes.
Thats if they dont want to pool money together to buy or maintain a reverse osmosis system
This is the literal definition of the government building a desalination plant. Its orders of magnitude more resource efficient than a home made solar still.
And then again, 1 gallon per day for $10 is $300 per month, and you have neither washed, showered or flushed the toilett for that price.
Still beats dying. Another solutions would be to pipe salt water directly to the pipes. That would allow toilets and showers to operate then you would just have to carry in water for drinking and cooking.
Yes, that was my first idea, too.
But I guess, corrosion or other hassles make it impractical.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.