The kids always check with me:
"Can I have a bath?"
"No."
If the water tank's getting low,
we just know it's 30-second showers.
If you have to wash your hair it's one song.
For most of us,
when we turn on the tap, it's a given
that fresh, clean drinking water comes out.
But what would happen if
one day you turned on that tap
and nothing came out?
For some places in Australia,
that's a genuine fear.
One of those places is Orange,
a city of about forty thousand people,
250 kilometres inland from Sydney.
It looks pretty green now,
but not so long ago,
the town was in the grips of
one of the worst dry spells that it's ever seen.
Orange is known as a colour city.
A city of four seasons.
It was really horrible and quite scary
to really see the impact of the drought
on such a beautiful regional city.
150-year-old trees started dying.
Gardens were shrivelling up.
But the scariest thing of all
was that the city's water supply
was also running super low.
To understand why,
it helps to look a little closer
at where Orange sits on a map.
The closest major river
is more than 20 kilometres away
and it's also pretty high up,
which means its rainwater catchment area
is quite small.
In short,
the town's water supply depends a lot
on rain to fill up its dams.
So when NSW was hit with its
driest 3-year period ever recorded,
the town's main water storage,
the Suma Park Dam,
began dropping from near full capacity
at the start of 2017 to just
20 per cent by the start of 2020.
Without any rain,
the city faced what's known as a zero-day scenario.
That's when it runs out of water.
If you're looking at running out of water
in six months time for a city of 40,000 people,
that's something that keeps you awake at night.
But as the town's water supply dwindled,
something kind of cool actually happened.
The way that people used water
started to completely transform.
So my name's Kate Hook.
I've been here since 2006,
which is when we bought this property.
We're totally 100 per cent on rainwater here,
so if it runs out it really runs out.
There's not a drop left in the tank.
On three occasions actually,
we've completely run out of water here.
So you turn on the tap,
nothing comes out. It's a really scary feeling.
Four years ago,
we had a situation
where the water level
was right up to the top of the dam wall
that you can see on the far side there
and it was absolutely overflowing
into the next door neighbour's property.
And yet, in the space of four years,
all that water just evaporated down
to not even a drop.
Locals like Kate,
who'd seen what life without water could look like,
became much more conscious of their water use.
These days,
there's barely a drop that comes out of her taps
that isn't accounted for.
It's just the little things.
So you know,
when we're all doing the washing up,
we never have the tap running to rinse things off.
It's like three centimetres of water
in the sink with the plug in
and you just use that and nothing else
to rinse everything off.
You know, it only takes running out of water once
and that sickening feeling of turning on the tap
and nothing coming out and then suddenly
all those things become quite easy.
Water just became a huge part of everyone's life.
There are signs up around town
showing how much water people are using every day
and the amount of water they were saving
became this source of pride for a lot of people.
Locals like Neil Jones,
who's lived here for 43 years,
started getting really creative
with the ways they use water.
The daily routine in our house -
the previous evening we have collected water
in our shower, in buckets.
That water will be taken
and tipped into the washing machine.
In the kitchen, the first lot of water might be cold.
We can collect that with a small bucket
and we might put that into the kettle
for boiling a cup of tea in the morning.
So if we're needing to water some plants
outside in the garden,
we access the water from our water tank for our garden use.
We don't wash our cars at all.
That's something that -
a special treat might be
to take our car through the local car wash.
Thinking about water as this scarce, finite resource
also meant locals have been
much more open to water recycling methods
that people in other parts of Australia
might think are gross.
Like the town's innovative stormwater harvesting system.
Basically, when it rains,
any water that falls on the pavement
or roads around town
is channelled back into a network of wetlands.
Over the course of a few months,
the water is naturally cleaned
and filtered by the wetlands
and after a little bit of extra treatment,
it's fed back into the town's drinking water supply.
Orange is one of the only places in Australia
to drink recycled water like this.
This system means that
barely a drop is wasted in this city when it rains
and it's been a lifesaver.
It's what's kept us functioning as a city.
Those small little showers
can provide us with a couple of days of water supply
and that's been critical.
Everyone we've spoken to in Orange
thinks that people from all over Australia
can learn from what's happened here
and the way this town's approach to water has changed.
That's important because
the dry run that Orange just went through -
that unfolded right across northern NSW
and southern Queensland.
Lots of towns actually did run out of water
and while many of these places have
begun recovering after a pretty wet 2020,
climate change trends show the severity
and frequency of droughts
is likely to intensify in the future.