Some of you may have heard that Cape Town has some major water issues… as in… they’re out of it.
After four years of drought, the water supply for the city has almost run out. The reservoir is almost empty. So at some point, the city will have to stop supplying water to homes and businesses. What does this mean for our visit? It didn’t affect us too much to be honest. At our first AirBNB, the owner asked that we take showers that were 90 seconds or shorter. Not a problem! Navy shower. Turn the water on, get wet, turn the water off, soap up, rinse off. We also had a bucket to collect shower water that we could use to flush the toilet. Besides showers, one suggestion was to only flush when necessary. Brown, flush it down. Also not hard to do. In many of the restaurants and public restrooms, the faucets were turned off completely and replaced with hand sanitizer. Finally, all drinking water that we had was bottled.
What did we learn from this experience? A ton. They estimate that if you run the water when you brush your teeth, you are wasting a gallon of water. Every flush of the toilet was labeled as 9 liters of water. Now, I know that this varies from toilet to toilet, but I can tell you that the amount of water in the bowl here was much lower than the amount that we keep in the bowls (on average) in the states. The biggest surprise to me was the showers. Even a super quick, less than 90 second, shower was filling a huge bucket (perhaps 2.5 gallons) and then some. That’s a shower where we were really trying our best to conserve. Imagine a leisurely shower!
I’m sure locals were doing a lot more than we were doing, but we tried to help as much as we could. The work that locals have been doing to conserve has really helped. The date that the city was expected to run out was originally April 1st, but that has now been pushed back because of how careful people have been. They’re also working on building systems to convert salt water to fresh, but won’t have that ready in time.
This is an issue that other cities are going to start having around the world. Neither Michael nor I can remember the details of this anecdote, but we’ve heard of wealthy people buying up land specifically because it has fresh water on it in preparation for when it becomes a scarce commodity. I know we are leisurely with water in the States or most places around the world (excluding Northern California), but it’s something we should probably be worried about.
Final thought: as with most issues regarding natural resources, it’s the poor who will be affected by this in Cape Town. We had no problem buying water for all of our needs and still using our 50 liters/day for showering and such. I’m sure there are many people who are being hit very hard by this and more so in the future.
On that sad note.. on to wine country!