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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.
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.
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