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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.
Most of the Caribbean islands have much smaller populations, around 100,000 or less and the islands with millions of people tend to have several lakes and rivers. It's a lot easier to deal with smaller populations, especially when that infrastructure has already been built and adjusted to meet the needs of population over time. Setting up new desalination plants to support millions of people is a logistical nightmare even if you have a highly competent team tackling the problem.
You each use only 16 gallons per month? Less than half a gallon a day? Is Saturday bath day in your house? Is the last person to bathe the one who drains the tub? I must be misunderstanding what you're saying.
No, he said:
My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month
2000 gallons /month/family
* 1/4 family/person = 500 gallons / person / month
* 1/30 month/day = 16.66 gallons / person / day
* 3.785 gallons / litre
= 63 litre/person/day
That's not too bad.
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
- All personal hygeine (toilet, shower etc.) except obviously anything at work/school (we don't shower at a gym or anything like that)
- All washing (dishes, laundry etc.) and cleaning in the house
- All drinking water and food preparation
- We use grey water (e.g. collect bath and shower water) for our small vegetable garden, but haven't used any water for the rest of the garden since they started water restrictions.
- The kids share one small plastic bath tub inside the normal bath tub, adults show with a 20l container in the shower, and don't use more than that, and don't shower every day (2-3 times a week).
- We haven't washed our cars in a year.
Lots of people have installed rain collection tanks and complete grey-water systems, and some have had boreholes/wells drilled (but there are long waiting lists with all contractors who install all of these).
I don't know why they haven't reduced the limit further, as it really isn't difficult to use less. 50l/person/day is probably achievable and still relatively fair.
The city has also imposed a 10.5kl limit per household per month, and any household that needs more because they have more than 4 occupants must apply for a higher allocation, but since we are way below we don't apply.
We know of other people who used didn't abide by the restrictions when they were more lenient, they have been forced to pay to have water restriction devices installed, which limit their daily water use (unused daily water accumulates for the rest of the month, but unused monthly water doesn't accumulate/roll over).
There are a lot more issues at play here than described in the BBC article, as the majority (60%0 of the water available in the dams in the Western Cape was allocated by the national government to agriculture. That is understandable, as even that allocation is too little for them (with the amount of rain over the past year), with many farmers having to choose between killing their livestock and taking loans to buy feed (and still possibly have to kill the livestock later anyway).
For some detail on how bad the drought is, see some rainfall stats for Cape Town. The past 3 years we have had less than the 20th percentile of annual rainfall over the last 40 years.
You can also see the trend of water storage in the dams here
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.