In my travels around the country, I've often came across this one: A town councilor, maybe even the mayor, showing off to his or friends, opened the sluice gates of the town's dam and left without closing it again. This always happened in a time of drought, on a weekend, and is then the main reason the town is running out of water or why it is so expensive. It is of course also always a black councilor, this would never have happened in the old white government days. An all SA urban legend as far as I know, but where and how did it start?

Drought isn't that bad--yet--but when, or if, the water runs out we've got ourselves a full-blown crisis. So we're trying our best to save water wherever we can--taking a 2 minute shower every second day, making sure to take a bucket into the shower with you to catch the grey water; flushing the bog with the water from the shower (but following the maxim "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down"); swimming pool is empty (apart from the kreepy-krawly hose and a dog's old bed); car is filthy, but that cloud has a silver lining: I don't have to waste time washing it.

The irony is that we have loads of water, in fact we're surrounded by it--but hardly any of it is suitable for consumption. It needs to be purified or desalinated first, which means a huge capital outlay for the infrastructure required. The other alternative is tapping the table mountain chain aquifer, which is said to contain six times as much water as the Vaal dam, but there are worries that extracting large quantities from it will cause sea water to infiltrate the aquifer rendering it useless in the future.

But maybe we'll have enough rain over the remainder of the summer and autumn to get us over the hump, and then the experts are predicting better winter rainfall this year....

I doubt you could efficiently produce any sufficient amount of water this way. I'm extremely skeptical of stuff like this. Smells a bit snake-oily