A major metropolitan city is running out of water.
Cape Town, South Africa, is home to 4 million people, and those residents get their water
from six major reservoirs.
In 2014, the biggest reservoir - which provides half of the city’s water - looked like this.
And this is what it look like now.
The government has put the city on a ticking time bomb, awaiting the day those levels get
too low, and engineers shut off the taps.
They’re calling it: Day Zero.
Hey guys I’m Judah, this is NowThis World, and on this episode we’re going back in
time to figure out how Cape Town went from experiencing one of its wettest years in decades,
to the precipice of becoming the first major city in the world to have to turn off its
taps.
Let’s jump back to 2013.
Cape Town saw almost 27 inches of rainfall - making it the third wettest year since the
mid-seventies.
Dams were actually overflowing.
And climatologists predicted even wetter years to come.
But things dried up pretty quickly.
In 2014, Cape Town saw 7 inches less than the year before.
Then 7 and a half inches less than that in 2015.
By then, they were down to just 12 inches of rain in the whole year, and the city entered
a full-on drought.
And things kept getting worse.
In 2016, the city saw just under 9 inches of rainfall.
And last year?
Just 6 inches.
To put that in context, that’s just 2 inches more than the average for parts of the Sahara
desert.
A hydrologist at the University of Cape Town who studies water and climate change impact
analyzed the past 5 years of rainfall compared to rainfall records dating back almost 100
years.
He found that the likelihood that two back-to-back years as dry as 2016 and 2017 would occur
once in 1,150 years.
So, is Cape Town just that unlucky?
Environmental scientists agree that people can expect “more severe and more frequent
droughts” to come - in Cape Town and other global cities.
The three-year drought has been slowly depleting the city’s reservoirs.
The largest dam that most residents rely on went from being at full capacity down to just
12% capacity.
But Cape Town had more problems than just the weather.
Those years of severe drought revealed deeper obstacles in the city’s infrastructure plans
- ones that exacerbated the drought rather than alleviate its effects.
The first thing that’s important to know about Cape Town’s water infrastructure,
is that the national government is in charge of maintaining and planning it.
A University of Cape Town water expert told the New York Times that the city focused too
heavily on expensive, long-term projects like desalination plants to help address the water
crisis, rather than quicker, cheaper options like tapping into groundwater resources.
A project that was reportedly started, but put on hold in 2011.
And when, in 2015, the Western Cape provincial government applied to declare the drought
a “national disaster” - a necessary step in order to get funding for local drought
preparation - the national government rejected their application.
A few months later, the national government accepted the disaster application for a few
municipalities.
They were promised almost 3 million U.S. dollars from federal water and development departments.
Meanwhile, Cape Town applied for a city-wide disaster status in early 2017.
Remember - this was the year that saw just 6 inches of rainfall.
The national Department of Water Affairs rejected the application, saying “although the water
situation is concerning, it is not yet at crisis level.”
One of the department’s higher-ups even reportedly accused Cape Town of just trying
to secure funding for future projects.
Also according to South African journalist William Saunderson-Meyer, there could be political
motivations behind the mismanagement.
The Western Cape (including Cape Town), are governed by a party called the Democratic
Alliance.
But the national government is run by a different party, the African National Congress - which
has been the dominant ruling party in post-apartheid South Africa.
But this doesn’t just come down to political motives.
It also has to do with widespread income inequality and the residents who benefit from it.
Cape Town’s population grew 80% from 1995 to 2018.
A booming tourist hub, its growing populace has only contributed to South Africa’s extreme
wealth disparity.
According to the UN Human Development Index, South Africa has the highest degree of income
inequality of any country in the world.
So while many low-income communities in and around Cape Town have already been suffering
from years of water shortages, unreliable access to clean water, and long communal distribution
lines, the wealthy have been installing private water tanks in their homes - and many have
failed to cut back their usage to meet the city’s standards.
Last year, the city asked locals to restrict their water usage to 23 gallons per day, a
target number that 60% of residents didn’t meet.
In January, the government decreased that number to just 13 gallons per day - and it’s
unclear how many residents are sticking to that
The rich are much more likely to overuse tap water for things like pools & gardens, and
much more likely to be able to pay the city’s growing tariffs and fines for doing so.
But about a million people live in Cape Town’s more than 400 informal settlements.
Those people make up a quarter of the population, but use just under 5% of the city’s water.
And people in those communities are more likely to have leaky, unreliable and difficult-to-access
communal water taps.
Often, 10-20 families share access to porta potties, because of a lack of plumbing.
Some say this Day Zero water crisis is just highlighting the fact that under-resourced
communities in Cape Town have been experiencing water shortages for years, without much government
help or viral hashtags.
So, if you live in or are visiting Cape Town - what can you expect to happen on Day Zero?
To be clear, Day Zero isn’t the day Cape Town runs out of water.
But it is the day that most people in the city would turn on their taps, only to find
that nothing comes out.
No drinking, bathing, or even toilet water.
According to the city’s disaster plan, 13.5% is the magic number.
When Cape Town’s reservoirs get down to holding just 13.5% of capacity, the water
that’s left will go to hospitals, nursing homes and communal taps designed where folks
will be required to line up for a daily, pre-approved amount of 6.6 gallons per person.
And it’s unclear how long that system would last.
But this should serve as a wake-up call to local and national governments around the
world.
Cape Town isn’t the first city to suffer severe water shortages - more than 800 cities
across Brazil entered a state of emergency just last year after millions were forced
to ration water, for many of the same reasons that led Cape Town to this point.
And it won’t be the last city, either.
Climate scientists are warning the international community that water crises are inevitable
as the effects of climate change and urbanization build up.
So will local governments look to Cape Town as a cautionary lesson to prepare for the
future - or will other cities soon face their own Day Zeroes?
Let me know what you think below!
Thanks for watching NowThis World and please don’t forget to like and subscribe!