Cape Town Is 90 Days Away From Running Out Of Water

[Swordsmyth]

Cape Town, South Africa is on schedule to run out of water in less than 95 days, and when they do, the government will turn off the taps.

“There are only 95 days left before we reach Day Zero,” the City of Cape Town announced on January 15 in a statement. “Day Zero has moved a day closer this week to April 21, 2018. Day Zero is when the City will be forced to turn off most of the taps.”

The coastal South African city has been battling droughts for nearly three years, amounting to the worst one in their history. With little rain on the horizon, the city has now ordered its 3.7 million residents to drastically cut their water consumption, take short stop-start showers, not wash their cars, and flush toilets as little as possible. If they don’t, all of their taps could be shut off by the government in April.

The city doesn’t appear to have any plan in place for such a SHTF event. But if the government cannot find a solution to the problem, Capetonians will be forced into “bread lines” for water. As if that isn’t scary enough, city residents will have a limit of 5.5 gallons of water a day that will only be given to them at specific government outposts around the city.
Cape Town’s mayor Patricia de Lille‏ tweeted: “I cannot stress it enough: all residents must save water and use less than 87 liters [19 gallons] per day… We must avoid Day Zero and saving water is the only way we can do this.” Not missing the opportunity to levy extra taxes on the populace, the city mayor has also impeded a “drought charge” in order to fund new water projects, such as constructing desalination plants.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...ning-out-water

[Keith and stuff]

Seems like the easy solution would be to get water from the ocean. Then the city couldn't run out of water. Perhaps decades of poorly run city government contributed to this problem?

[sparebulb]

Obviously, the white people stole all of the water.

[angelatc]

I cannot stress it enough: all residents must save water and use less than 87 liters [19 gallons] per day...

I'm bottling the stuff 24/7 starting right now.

[Brian4Liberty]

Seems like the easy solution would be to get water from the ocean. Then the city couldn't run out of water. Perhaps decades of poorly run city government contributed to this problem?

The problem is that desalination is very expensive, at least relative to rain. Places with intermittent droughts go with the cheaper route of just waiting for the next rain. Same as California.

Increasing the population increases the need for water, so maybe someday desalinization will have to be implemented. Expect water rates to skyrocket and strict conservation limits to become the norm.

[Brian4Liberty]

I'm bottling the stuff 24/7 starting right now.

Gonna ship and sell on EBay?

[angelatc]

Gonna ship and sell on EBay?

LOL - no i meant if I lived there. Or start learning how to extract water from the earth and the ground. Or migrate, like lots of other AFricans...

[angelatc]

Gonna ship and sell on EBay?

Actually though, this takes me back to the hissy fit that the left had over the comments Nestle's CEO made, about how water distribution was better handled via capitalism than government. Appears he was right and they were wrong.

[Superfluous Man]

When I saw this story I thought there must be some kind of price controls going on. Otherwise, this wouldn't happen.

So I tried googling searches about Cape Town water price controls, and nothing really came up.

Anybody know what price controls they may have?

[Swordsmyth]

With the so-called "Day Zero" less than 3 months away, security forces have been drafted to guard water-collection points and Capetonians have turned to prayer sessions for hope.
Just two weeks ago, Cape Town’s mayor Patricia de Lille‏ tweeted:

“I cannot stress it enough: all residents must save water and use less than 87 liters [19 gallons] per day… We must avoid Day Zero and saving water is the only way we can do this.”

Not missing the opportunity to levy extra taxes on the populace, the city mayor has also impeded a “drought charge” in order to fund new water projects, such as constructing desalination plants.
But today, Cape Town's leaders have instructed residents to use only 50 liters of water daily from Feb. 1, down from the current 87-liter limit.

"We have reached the point of no return,” Patricia de Lille, Cape Town’s mayor, warned this month. With anger in her voice she added: “It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care.”

Security guards made sure people took only an allotted amount (25 liters maximum in one line and 15 liters in another 'express' line).

"There are a lot of people who have been in denial and now they suddenly realize this is for real," said Shirley Curry, who waited to fill a plastic container with spring water from one of several taps outside a South African Breweries facility in the Newlands suburb.
As The FT reports, climatologists say that another year of drought cannot be ruled out.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...lection-points

[dannno]

When I saw this story I thought there must be some kind of price controls going on. Otherwise, this wouldn't happen.

So I tried googling searches about Cape Town water price controls, and nothing really came up.

Anybody know what price controls they may have?

Ya, in order to get a government contract, you can only have a maximum of 8% white people in your company (since only 8% of the population is white). So the companies who deliver water to the population had to fire all of their best engineers.

11:50 (although the entire interview is certainly worth watching)

[Swordsmyth]

The 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water - like Cape Town

1. São Paulo

2. Bangalore

3. Beijing

4. Cairo

5. Jakarta

6. Moscow

7. Istanbul

8. Mexico City

9. London

10. Tokyo

11. Miami

More at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959

[dannno]

The 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water - like Cape Town


1. São Paulo


2. Bangalore


3. Beijing


4. Cairo


5. Jakarta


6. Moscow


7. Istanbul


8. Mexico City


9. London


10. Tokyo


11. Miami



More at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959

Are any of them firing their engineers because of their race

[Swordsmyth]

Are any of them firing their engineers because they are white

The article doesn't say.

[dannno]

The article doesn't say.

Hmm, I wonder why

[Swordsmyth]

A brief rainfall Feb. 9 pushed "Day Zero" for Cape Town in South Africa from April to May, CNN reported.

More at: https://worldview.stratfor.com/situa...zero-cape-town

[dannno]

bump - this is an interview with Lauren Southern, she is currently producing a documentary on the topic and this interview is the best source of information I have been able to find on her upcoming film. It is very important that people learn this information as it is not being discussed in the media. If you have a better source for the information, such as another interview with Lauren or a documentary on the subject that is better than the one she is producing then please post that instead of talking to me about your irrational hatred of Molyneux.

Ya, in order to get a government contract, you can only have a maximum of 8% white people in your company (since only 8% of the population is white). So the companies who deliver water to the population had to fire all of their best engineers.

11:50 (although the entire interview is certainly worth watching)

[dannno]

^ Hint: The genocide is a bigger issue than the water, but they are connected.

[Swordsmyth]

Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to solve the city's worst water crisis in a century... by tugging icebergs from Antarctica...

Reuters reports that salvage master Nick Sloane is looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water.

“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet,” said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.

As his detailed presentation shows, this is how much water Cape town uses in one year...

...and this is how big an iceberg would need to be to provide the required 135 million litres of water every single day for a year:

Cape Town-based Sloane told Reuters his team could wrap passing icebergs in fabric skirts to protect them and reduce evaporation. Large tankers could then guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.

A milling machine would then then cut into the ice, producing a slurry and forming a saucer structure that will speed up the natural process, he said.
A single iceberg “could produce about 150 million litres per day for about a year,” around 30 percent of the city’s needs, said Sloane, a director at the U.S. marine salvage firm Resolve Marine.

The ocean currents could help push it towards South Africa. Assuming the capture is done in a location westward of South Africa, the combined impact of the Circumpolar and the Benguela currents, as well as the Coriolis effect (the impact of Earth's rotation on weather patterns and ocean currents) may assist in reducing the towing power required.
It could then be parked 40km off the coast and turned into a mine.

As Reuters conclude, Sloane is planning to hold a conference later this month to try and sell the $130 million project to city officials and investors.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...s-water-crisis

[wizardwatson]

Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to solve the city's worst water crisis in a century... by tugging icebergs from Antarctica...

Reuters reports that salvage master Nick Sloane is looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water.

“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet,” said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.

As his detailed presentation shows, this is how much water Cape town uses in one year...

...and this is how big an iceberg would need to be to provide the required 135 million litres of water every single day for a year:

Cape Town-based Sloane told Reuters his team could wrap passing icebergs in fabric skirts to protect them and reduce evaporation. Large tankers could then guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.

A milling machine would then then cut into the ice, producing a slurry and forming a saucer structure that will speed up the natural process, he said.
A single iceberg “could produce about 150 million litres per day for about a year,” around 30 percent of the city’s needs, said Sloane, a director at the U.S. marine salvage firm Resolve Marine.

The ocean currents could help push it towards South Africa. Assuming the capture is done in a location westward of South Africa, the combined impact of the Circumpolar and the Benguela currents, as well as the Coriolis effect (the impact of Earth's rotation on weather patterns and ocean currents) may assist in reducing the towing power required.
It could then be parked 40km off the coast and turned into a mine.

As Reuters conclude, Sloane is planning to hold a conference later this month to try and sell the $130 million project to city officials and investors.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...s-water-crisis

These guys have actually been in business a long time.

[first 40 seconds]

[Pauls' Revere]

The 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water - like Cape Town

1. São Paulo

2. Bangalore

3. Beijing

4. Cairo

5. Jakarta

6. Moscow

7. Istanbul

8. Mexico City

9. London

10. Tokyo

11. Miami

More at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959

any wonder these are some of the most populated centers on the planet. Where will all those people go? What will they do?

[Swordsmyth]

Where will all those people go?

Nearby cities, suburbs and countrysides.

What will they do?

Loot and/or demand government aid.

[Swordsmyth]

Remember earlier in the year when the news was abuzz about Day Zero in Cape Town, South Africa? According to the press at the time, the day was looming when the city of 3.74 million people would run completely out of water. First, the date of Day Zero was heralded as April 16th, then May 11th, then June 4th.

Calculating Day Zero took into account maximum evaporation (based on temperature and wind) and existing patterns in agricultural and urban use - an equation that considered both natural and man-made conditions. (source)

Now, they’re saying the disaster has been averted for now, but that it could happen in 2019. And if you think the water restrictions in California are tough, wait until you see what they’re doing in Cape Town.

So how did Cape Town avoid Day Zero?

Day Zero was delayed by a combination of things. Fortunately, there was some rainfall, and citizens went to great effort to reduce their water usage. There was a public campaign to basically scare Capetonians into compliance with conservation efforts.

Late last year, as the South African government faced the prospect of its largest city running out of water, they took an unprecedented gamble.
The government announced “day zero” – a moment when dam levels would be so low that they would turn off the taps in Cape Town and send people to communal water collection points.
This apocalyptic notion prompted water stockpiling and panic, caused a drop in tourism bookings, and raised the spectre of civil unrest.
It also worked. After years of trying to convince residents to conserve, the aggressive campaign jolted people into action. Water use was (and still is) restricted to 50 litres per person per day. (In 2016, average daily per capita use in California was 321 litres.) Households that exceed the limit face hefty fines, or having a meter installed in their home that shuts off their water once they go over. (source)

Oh, and then there was the public shaming.

…The city publicly shamed water offenders, with the now former mayor visiting the homes of water wasters and her office publishing a list of the top 100 offenders. (source)

There’s even a website where you can check the levels of the water supply.
The water restrictions there make the water restrictions announced last week in California look like a hedonistic luxury vacation to the folks living in Cape Town.
How people in Cape Town are cutting their water usage

I got a friendly email from a Jaco, a reader who lives in Cape Town and he told me, basically, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Instead of a luxurious 55 gallons per day per person, Capetonians are limited to 13.5 gallons per day per person.

Welcome to the new norm.
Here in Cape Town, we came VERY close to running dry. We are still not out of the woods by any means, the city can still run out of water in 2019 onwards unless we stop relying on just the rain.
So we are forced to use 50l pppd = 13.2086 gallons per person per day.
You can use more water, but then these things happen:
1) You get billed some serious money for the extra water.
2) If you continue, your flow can be limited with a device to just 50l pppd.
3) And if you keep on ignoring the above, they can take legal action.
We are 6 people using 5000l of water consistently (1320.86 gallons) per month for EVERYTHING.
There are some seriously clever things we were forced to do.
I now realise the amount of water we, as a city, wasted before.

So, obviously, I was dying to know the clever things they were forced to do. There are some fantastic lessons for preppers in all this because if you one day live in a world in which all the water you have has to be procured and carried to your home, you’ll want to conserve or you’ll be hauling water non-stop at our current rates of usage.
Jaco from Cape Town continued with some comparisons to the restrictions recently launched in California:

To give you an idea:
– An 8-minute shower uses about 17 gallons of water
o We are on 90 second showers if you have to shower per day. People are not showering per day anymore.
o Catch all the shower water, use if for the toilet.
– A load of laundry uses about 40 gallons of water
o We use rainwater – about 50l (13gal) per wash.
o Changed the soap, so we don’t have to use the rinse cycle – that is another 50l.
o ALL the water is pumped into a drum, used for toilets. Use pool HTH to keep the smell at bay.
o Some people have changed their washing machines, to use <40l per wash with rinsing.
– A bathtub holds 80 to 100 gallons of water
o Those days are gone, no really, forget a bath.
o If you have to bath, better have a sponge bath.
o Catch the water for the toilets.
– A dishwasher uses 6 gallons of water
o Nope, 2.5-5l per wash. Better swap the dishwasher for a German model that saves water.
o Or, use rainwater.

And a lot of things are now completely illegal. For example:

Illegal to water the gardens. Have had to let plants die, rather get local fauna and flora that can grow In the area.
Illegal to wash your car.
Illegal to top up your pool. Pool must have a cover. Use rainwater or order grey water from the council.

The cost of water has gone up dramatically:

Because the municipality is now earning substantially less due to less water purchased, the rates per kilolitre went up substantially.
We used to pay +-R90.00 for 25,000 litres of water.
We now pay R125.00 ($9.83) for 5,000l of water.
25,000 litres (6604 gallons) or of water could cost about +-R25 000 ($1965.73) today – if you dare.

The key is the reuse of gray water, something that very few places in the United States are doing.

We found that ALL the grey water we generate, not kitchen grey water, can be used for the toilets.
That is the biggest saving. Not one drop of clean water goes down toilets, as all the taps feeding the toilets are closed off.
The trick is, ALL greywater must be used for toilets.
Without toilets flushing, sickness will enter the equation.
Do not flush clean water down a toilet, ever.
Invest in portable pools or water tanks, and use that water for like washing clothes, then to toilets.

Jaco’s excellent suggestions and information could be very valuable for those facing shortages now or in the future.
Unsurprisingly there was government mismanagement involved.

When I asked about the postponement of Day Zero, the answer was something we can all relate to. Some corrupt person or persons had mismanaged the utility and all but bankrupted it. And with all the hubbub about Day Zero, tourists were staying away from Cape Town, making a bad problem even worse. Jaco wrote:

My take?
#DAyZero went away because it costed the local economy too much due to less tourist.
AND, it turns out, the National Department of Water and Sanitation, was mismanaged to the tune of millions of Rands, effectively bankrupt, which was THE biggest problem, bar all missing the warning signs the last few years…
So instead of losing more income and making the ANC look even worse, the politicians “agreed” to suspend DayZero – for now.
The problem however, is still very real.
Dam levels are slowly rising, but if the dams are not full by end of the year, DAYZero is looming in 2019.
Some schemes are online, but in the end, they will not be enough. Need bigger desalination plants.
And, we have not reached the set 450mil of water per day for the city as a whole.
So for now, the new norm is fixed on 13.2086 gallons per person per day.
So the 50 gallons, yes, you are barking up the wrong tree – it is going to get much worse.
People HAVE to change, not only preppers.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...-out-cape-town

[Swordsmyth]

Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to solve the city's worst water crisis in a century... by tugging icebergs from Antarctica...

Reuters reports that salvage master Nick Sloane is looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water.

“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet,” said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.

As his detailed presentation shows, this is how much water Cape town uses in one year...

...and this is how big an iceberg would need to be to provide the required 135 million litres of water every single day for a year:

Cape Town-based Sloane told Reuters his team could wrap passing icebergs in fabric skirts to protect them and reduce evaporation. Large tankers could then guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.

A milling machine would then then cut into the ice, producing a slurry and forming a saucer structure that will speed up the natural process, he said.
A single iceberg “could produce about 150 million litres per day for about a year,” around 30 percent of the city’s needs, said Sloane, a director at the U.S. marine salvage firm Resolve Marine.

The ocean currents could help push it towards South Africa. Assuming the capture is done in a location westward of South Africa, the combined impact of the Circumpolar and the Benguela currents, as well as the Coriolis effect (the impact of Earth's rotation on weather patterns and ocean currents) may assist in reducing the towing power required.
It could then be parked 40km off the coast and turned into a mine.

As Reuters conclude, Sloane is planning to hold a conference later this month to try and sell the $130 million project to city officials and investors.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...s-water-crisis

These guys have actually been in business a long time.

[first 40 seconds]

Nicholas Sloane doesn’t mind discomfort. The 56-year-old South African marine-salvage master has survived two helicopter crashes and spent thousands of hours aboard ships that are burning, sinking, breaking apart, or leaking oil, chemicals, or cargo into the ocean. Often, he gets calls in the middle of the night asking him to pack his bags and fly immediately to a disaster zone across the world, anywhere from Yemen to Papua New Guinea. Twice, he’s fought off armed pirates using water cannons, sound cannons, and strobe lights.

Usually, Sloane rooms on location, bunking in makeshift beds aboard singed or waterlogged ships he’s working to rescue. He once lived for three months with a family on Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago, orchestrating the logistics of catching and washing thousands of rockhopper penguins drenched in bunker fuel from a shipwreck. More recently, he spent 2½ years overseeing the almost $1 billion refloating of the Costa Concordia, the infamous Italian cruise ship that capsized inside a marine sanctuary off the coast of Tuscany, killing 32 passengers.
But at some point early last year, Sloane really wanted to take a bath and couldn’t. He was home with his family in Cape Town, which had recently declared an emergency: After three years of severe drought, the city of 4 million was at risk of becoming one of the first in the world to run out of municipal water. To forestall a shutoff, each household was permitted only 50 liters—about 13 gallons—per day per person to cover drinking, cooking, washing, and showers. “That’s enough to fill less than half a tub,” says Sloane, a soft-spoken man with graying hair, ruddy skin, and a deep crease between his green eyes. “My wife used to take a bath every night and a shower every morning. She told me, ‘You’d better do something.’ ”
More than a year later, disaster has been averted, thanks to badly needed rainfall and drastic reduction in water use. But conditions in Cape Town remain far from normal. The daily-use limit has been raised, but only to 70 liters, and people still take speed showers, collecting the runoff to use for toilet flushing. Some hotels have removed stoppers from bathtubs to keep profligate tourists in line. And farmers throughout the country are reeling. More than 30,000 seasonal jobs have been lost in the Western Cape, and crop production has declined by about 20%. During the height of the drought, hundreds of farmers in the Northern Cape killed off most of their livestock rather than truck in costly feed. “Everyone has cut back their flocks of sheep to the bare minimum needed to start again when it rains,” one farmer told Bloomberg News in 2017.

Sloane still hasn’t taken that bath at home, and he isn’t optimistic about Cape Town’s future. “We’ll never get back to the days where water is flowing all over the Cape,” he says, pointing out that the city’s population has grown almost 40% in the last 20 years. “If the taps run dry, the first day people will be standing in lines at watering points throughout the city. The second day, if you don’t get your water, well, people are killed for that.”


That’s why Sloane is working on a solution that might sound absurd. Making use of his unusual skill set, he plans to harness and tow an enormous Antarctic iceberg to South Africa and convert it into municipal water. “To make it economically feasible, the iceberg will have to be big,” Sloane says. Ideally, it would measure about 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) long, 500 meters wide, and 250 meters deep, and weigh 125 million tons. “That would supply about 20% of Cape Town’s water needs for a year.”
Sloane has already assembled a team of glaciologists, oceanographers, and engineers. He’s also secured a group of financiers to fund the pioneer tow, which he calls the Southern Ice Project. The expected cost is more than $200 million, much of it to be put up by two South African banks and Water Vision AG, a Swiss water technology and infrastructure company.
Now Sloane’s team needs an agreement with South Africa to buy the Antarctic water, if the plan succeeds. His team could charter the necessary ships and prepare all required materials within six months, though the mission will need to take place in November or December, when the Antarctic climate is somewhat less ferocious. “We’re taking on all the risk,” he says. “We’re ready to go.”
Harvesting icebergs isn’t a new idea. In the mid-1800s, breweries in Chile towed small ones, sometimes outfitted with sails, from Laguna San Rafael to Valparaiso, where they were used for refrigeration. In the late 1940s, John Isaacs of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began exploring more fantastical plans, such as transporting an 8 billion-ton iceberg to San Diego to mitigate California droughts. (Icebergs of the size Isaacs had in mind—20 miles long, 3,000 feet wide, and 1,000 feet deep—are extremely rare.) In the ’60s oil companies began using thick ropes to wrangle and redirect much smaller Arctic icebergs before they collided with rigs, a practice that’s now common. If conditions are too rough, or a berg too big, the rigs sometimes need to be moved instead.


In the ’70s, the U.S. Army and the Rand Corp. both looked into using Antarctic ice as a source of fresh water. At about the same time, Prince Mohammed al-Faisal began pouring funds into polar research, in hopes that his assembled team of international glaciologists and engineers would find a way to alter the drift of icebergs, potentially bringing them as far as Western Australia. Prince Mohammed even sponsored the First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization for Fresh Water Production, Weather Modification and Other Applications in, of all places, Ames, Iowa, in 1977 and had a miniberg weighing 4,800 pounds trucked in from Alaska. “The people of Ames have seen princes before, but it has been many millenniums since an iceberg has visited these parts,” wrote the New York Times, delighting in the spectacle. The paper also described some of the more outlandish suggestions floated by speakers, such as outfitting icebergs with nuclear-powered paddle wheels that would allow them to “be propelled as self-contained units.” One skeptical delegate lamented: “There isn’t much money around these days for Arctic and Antarctic research, so they’ve flocked around like flies to the honey pot. It’s embarrassing.”
Eventually, Prince Mohammed stopped funding polar research, but attempts to access iceberg water continued.

More at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...million-people