What is the council doing?
REGARDING our water crisis, most people I know are trying to use as little water as possible. For the past four months my household of two people has used 1kl per month (under 20 litres per person per day) at home – although we have a two-minute shower three to four times a week at the gym, which is excluded in the above consumption. Some pot plants and a small section of garden are watered with grey water, but we don’t produce enough grey to keep everything alive and we watch as the rest withers and dies.
As a child, bedding was washed fortnightly, but now, unless one perspires excessively, duvet covers can go for much longer without washing or compromising personal hygiene. Shirts are not changed daily, dirty dishes are accumulated and washed once a day in one shallow sink of water.
I have grown a beard to eliminate using water for shaving and some friends now use electric razors. Toilets at home are flushed once a day per person using sea water which, when the tide permits, I collect three times a week in several two-litre plastic bottles from rock pools, which I pass when going to the gym. It will be difficult to reduce my consumption any further – apart from hiding the dog’s water bowl!
With amazement and anger I ask what has the council done to provide additional water? Fliers were sent out, street signs urge us to reduce usage, control valves have been fitted on some water meters and there is plenty of talk of aquifers and desalination, but we see nothing which supplies additional water into the system.
Two months ago, I attended a meeting where the ward councillor Ian Iversen stated there was a desalination ship in Gordon’s Bay and two more on the way from Dubai. Three weeks ago I queried this by e-mail, but he has not responded. It appears the council only sits with fingers crossed hoping for rain, which clearly is not going to fall.
Before we are destroyed by bureaucratic gross incompetence, will someone inform us what is being done to supply more water? Visible, urgent action is needed immediately.