Cape Town drinks to end of drought
Lush lawns and brimming swimming pools are no longer Cape Town’s guilty pleasures.
Two years after South Africa’s second city was on track to become the world’s first to run out of drinking water, its reservoirs are overflowing and usage restrictions are being lifted.
The verdant vineyards on its Table Mountain backdrop make it hard to recall Cape Town’s collective panic in the late summer of 2018 as ‘‘Day Zero’’ loomed, when mains supplies were predicted to run dry.
That catastrophe was narrowly averted, largely due to one of the most ambitious civic water conservation strategies ever attempted.
‘‘Few cities would be able to match what Cape Town pulled off to change the behaviours of millions of people,’’ said Neil Armitage, a professor of civil water engineering at the University of Cape Town. ‘‘Many doubted it was possible, but it’s now held up to the world as an example of what can be done.’’
A national emergency forced residents and businesses to reduce consumption at breakneck pace. Punitive tariffs were introduced, and heavy users had their supply cut off once they had reached new daily limits.
The wasteful were shamed in published municipal maps detailing breaches street by street. While many wealthy households avoided the limits by drilling wells, most Capetonians muddled through on rations of 50 litres per person – or seven buckets – per day.
Showers were typically taken using a 90-second egg timer, with bowls to catch the runoff to flush the toilet. There was talk of an iceberg being towed from the Antarctic to South Africa’s parched west coast.
Even when the rains finally came, Cape Town did not go back to its wasteful ways. Today, its 4.6 million residents consume in total as much water as they did in the late 1980s, when the city’s population was half what it is now.
In the townships and settlements that account for a quarter of Cape Town’s residents, and where a single tap serves up to 25 households, life has always resembled ‘‘Day Zero’’.
Patricia Sigicu, 48, who lives in Masiphumele on the city’s outskirts, estimated that she and her son each used three buckets of water a day. ‘‘It is easy to know how much you need if you have to carry it,’’ she said.
The politics of water laid bare ‘‘ a tale of two South Africas’’, Armitage said – a wealthier, better-managed one represented by Cape Town, and the other, poorer cities and towns.
In Cape Town, 15 per cent of bulk water from reservoirs is lost to leaks. In South Africa as a whole, it is 45 per cent.
‘‘We might feel grateful for the drought in Cape Town because it brought home lessons that needed to be learnt,’’ Armitage said.