How a city runs dry..

It was a strange feeling to have a dawning realisation that already impending results of changes to our environmental 'back yard' were not only coming sooner, due to multitudes of factors, but coming much, much closer to home...

Some of those results had shown themselves on other ways. My home city and its surroundings were now getting for the first time in 'locally known and lived momory', tornados, twisters.

Nothing akin to the beasts in tornado alley I assure you. But funnels, with touchdowns, 3 years in a row.

So that was a quite out the blue occurance...

I did some other searching, and found some footage of a flooding Ayres rock. Not sure if they too often get rainfall that makes rivers run down the side of a stone in the middle of the desert. By the way I literally mean rivers, it certainly looked like a lot of water flow on film.

A late 'bergwind' scenario in Calafornia, perhaps a knock-on from an over long drought, but why was that drought so long?

And then came Irma.

And CNN's tightly contained panic shortly there after.

Irma was significant because a single storm had energy levels comparable to an entire season of hurricane storms.

So it was definitely an outlier... any way back home, our preparedness was also an outlier, in what was unfolding in what increasingly appeared to be the worst possible way.

Cape Town.

It was September when Irma was nearly gonna be lashing Miami, but then its there, no its there, wait WTF is this even?!

Cape Town were midstride and midbrace, water restrictions well underway, and being generally observed, but the levels dangerously low, with tourist season approaching, and the rest of the dry season impending...

As it stands currently, water availability is measured in tens of days, not hundreds. Just for some clarity, perhaps a single generous handful of 10 days remain until the dreaded Day Zero.

Perhaps its easy for me, as currently my city is only occasionally blipping to level 1 water restrictions, maybe level 2 on occasions. There is some awareness of water consumption here, but nothing like the life style altering rations going on and planned for The Cape.

The current plan seems somewhat limited, ultimately desalination plants (which are essentially not the best idea anyway) are well behind schedule, also, they could never hope to compete with the 600 million litre daily demand.

Desalination plants may trickle in a generous handful of million litres per day, but naturally they polute. One of the real challenges here is that they tend to put in 'warmer water than they take out', this heat pollution is a big no-go, a literal shot in the foot as climate change intensifies.

So as things stand for our dearly beloved Mother City, there seems to be no comfortable solution, nor any long term respite any time soon. I think the real grind is going to come with how long Day Zero might last, the wet season is some 3-4 months away, there will naturally be a lot of hope around rainfall. But I think it will be unlikely that a single season will steer the path of a ship already ridden astray for some time. However, for the stake of moral support lets assume that they get a 'big break' perhaps in July.

Cape Town's population is some 4 million people, of which fully one quarter live in informal settlements. The current plan is to set up and maintain daily water distribution points handing out water to some 3 million people, part of the idea is that elderly and young people may have water distributed to them, however everyone else is going to have to queue daily, at one of around 200 water distribution points around the city.

Some #quickmath puts this at around 16000 people per queue per day. Just remember that when you finally get out the stadium sized queue, that there is unlikely to a be flushing toilet at work, or any public space. The receptionist, the guard, the programmer are all going to be queuing too.

This might go on for perhaps 2 or 3 months....perhaps more....

Can I just mention that #WaterSecurity is one of the key factors for why people actually formed cities in the first place?

Ultimately the #CapeWaterCrisis is a failing on the parts of every party who has governed there in living memory.

Currently I believe the department in charge of handling the crisis is already out of money, or is running out fast. A local 'nutshot' opportunity seems to have presented itself, and the ruling party of the country seems to have put up 'something of a bureaucratic barricade' between soon to be desperate people and critical funding.

If I could just give people a moments break, I heard that a bunch of penguins need rescuing, a bunch that tends increasing waddle count annually. At 6 liters per rescued penguin per day, there seems to be not a hint of a plan for any thing beyond 'base human catering', I doubt they would get much coverage, but I do hope (likely in vain) that some plans will be made to assist (or evacuate) animals at risk, as they will have very little opportunity to obtain naturally occurring water.

Ultimately we are all going to have to get to grips with and try to calmly deal with utter the shortsightedness, incompetence and inability to deliver which has lead to this dire situation.

I wish the people of Cape Town a steadfastness of heart, I pray that the people of this country will again learn to pull together and not apart.

The world I am sure will be watching, if somewhat dismissively, to see how the most #WaterInsecure nation in the world handles its first major environmental hurdle as we wrap up barely the prologue of what is to continue unfolding in the #ClimateChangeSaga

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Further Reading: and a look at some local sites :'')

https://www.wittyfeed.com/story/38345/australian-rock-changes-into-stunning-waterfall
http://telzilla.com/zero-hedge/cape-town-prays-as-day-zero-looms-security-forces-to-guard-water-collection-points/
https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-01-28-this-is-how-cape-towns-water-collection-points-will-work/
https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001268072/tempers-flare-at-cape-town-water-collection-point