Anyone here from Cape Town? Any first-hand accounts of the water crisis there? I last visited the Cape around 2002; it was so beautiful I wanted to immigrate there on the spot. It's been a recurring fantasy. Nowadays I'm glad I didn't. I can deal with lots of things, but drought is not among them.
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....