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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.
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.
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.
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