Song: Episode 4: Countdown to Day Zero
Viewed: 0 - Published at: 10 years ago
Artist: Vox Media Podcast Network
Year: 2018Viewed: 0 - Published at: 10 years ago
Sean: Okay Luke Vander Ploeg Today, Explained producer, you asked me to wear my swim trunks. I'm wearing them, what the H E double hockey sticks are we doing?
Luke: We are seeing how far 13 gallons of water will get you.
Sean: Like, a day?
Luke: Like a day.
Sean: And why are we doing this?
Luke: Because Cape Town is now down to 13 gallons per person of water per day
Sean: So that each person in Cape Town is limited to 13 gallons of water per day?
Luke: Yes.
Sean: But not 10 gallons, are they?
Luke: No no, 50 liters. They're not crazy.
Sean: Okay.
Luke: All right, what'd you do first this morning?
Sean: I used the toilet.
Luke: Did you flush?
Sean: If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down.
Luke: So you did flush?
Sean: Yes.
Luke: Four gallons.
Sean: Four gallons?! Cheese Louise.
Luke: Yeah, that's four gallons. So next up, what else did you do?
Sean: I brushed my teeth. I washed my face and my hands.
Luke: Okay, we'll call that a quarter gallon.
Sean: Okay, good, great.
Luke: Okay, continue.
Sean: I ate some cereal. I guess I then washed the bowl and I washed some other dishes that I had in the sink.
Luke: Okay, how long did that take you?
Sean: Five minutes.
Luke: With a low flow air rated sink?
Sean: Oh, you better believe a low flow air rated sink.
Luke: Alright we'll call that, that's eight gallons there.
Sean: Okay great. Is that good or bad? It sounds bad.
Luke: I mean, you've got 13 gallons. So what are you gonna do next?
Sean: Me? I'll take a shower.
Luke: All right, let's take a shower.
Sean: Sounds like it might be a short one.
Luke: I guess we'll see.
Sean: Okay.
Luke: I'm ready to go when you are. You just—
Sean: Okay. Ah, it's cold! Alright, I'm wetting down, I'm lathering. No, no time to waste, gotta get myself going. Oh, now it's really hot! Okay, I got shampoo in the hair, shampoo in the hair!
Luke: And, turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!
Sean: I got shampoo in my eye!
Luke: Alright, you're done.
Sean: I am so well over me.
Luke: Can I open the shower?
Sean: Sure.
Luke: How do you feel right now?
Sean: Incomplete.
Luke: This is all the water that you're allowed to use for the day so, you can't even like wink it, like a glass of water. You want to finish up your shower now?
Sean: Thanks, thanks Luke.
[Intro tune plays for 8 seconds]
Sean: This is Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and as you heard before I hit the shower. Cape Town South Africa is running out of water fast. But it was just a few years ago that the city was being recognized on this big global stage for how well it conserved water.
Announcer: The next C 40 award goes to the water conservation and demand management program from Cape Town. [Clapping]
Sean: And now, this model of sustainability is on the brink of shutting down all of its tabs.
Announcer female: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. This is the scenario Cape Town is now desperate to avoid.
[Background music starts playing]
Sean: So how to Cape Town get here, slowly?
Kristen: I mean, when the first water restrictions were introduced around the end of 2015 it was, it was kind of the obvious things like, don't fill up your pool all the time, and don't wash your car all the time.
Sean: And then, all at once.
Kristen: As the months went on, you did start thinking about it. You know, it was so much in the media, officials were talking about it so much.
Male newsreader: The current drought crisis in the Western Cape has resulted now in level five water restrictions being implemented by the City of Cape Town.
Sean: Kristen van Schie is a reporter in Cape Town, and she walked me through the city's water crisis.
Kristen: You felt you did have to take some kind of responsibility, so it was getting the leaks fixed. A couple months after that, it was showering with a bucket in the shower, and now we're at a stage where you're turning the water on to wet yourself, then turning the water off, then soaking up, but then turning the water back on to rinse yourself off. I'm only washing my hair once a week, because it just uses too much water, that you capture all the dirty grey water that you can, and you use that to flush your toilet, because the thought of flushing drinkable water down the toilet just seems atrocious now. It's all you think about throughout the course of the day, as you know, you brush your teeth, and you worry about the water that you're wasting. You go to a friend's house, and you worry about whether or not you should flush the toilet at their house. We'll just leave it standing. It's kind of inescapable right now, it's on everybody's minds.
[Background music stops playing after 8 seconds]
Kristen: Cape Town is this incredibly beautiful city. I moved here specifically for the natural beauty. You just have this, this mountain sort of towering over the rest of the city in the background, and these incredible ocean scapes in front of you. In the morning when you're walking through the city you have these clouds that just pour over the edge like a waterfall. I mean, it's, it's beautiful.
Sean: in 2015 Cape Town got this water conservation award. What were they doing right then? Because it seems like something's gone wrong since.
Kristen: So, the city gets its water from these six dams that lie outside of the city in what we call, catchment areas, where the rain falls. Around the mid 2000s, you had scientists warn in Cape Town that it didn't have enough water resources for the population growth that it was facing, but that advice was never really followed through. And, part of that has to do with the fact that it's not the City of Cape Town's job to increase the water supply that, that's a job that goes to national government, and because they were doing such a good job of keeping demand low in spite of population growth, it's something that wasn't a priority. Fast-forward to 2014-2015, and you have an El Niño event that affects all of Southern Africa.
Female newsreader: The devastating effects of El Niño. The lack of rain, accompanied by heatwaves.
Kristen: Namibia was hit, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, like name it. All the countries in the region.
Female newsreader: Millions are facing water shortages.
Kristen: Crops were down, dams were low. Cape Town has a different relationship with El Niño. While the rest of Southern Africa tends to get its rainfall in the summer periods, you know, these heavy thunderstorms, they just bunker down. Cape Town, instead, has a more Mediterranean like rainfall pattern, with the rainfall coming in these long slow showers over winter. You couldn't really have expected at the beginning to think that Cape Town would be that badly affected by El Niño, though rest of the region absolutely was, and I was in Cape Town in the winter of 2014, and it was an incredibly wet winter. The next year, the rains didn't come.
[Ominous tune starts playing in the background.]
Kristen: Or the year after that, or even the year after that. Where we have three consecutive winters now of, of poor rainfall. And one of the accusations you could lay is that you know, the city should have seen this coming, they should have prepared for this, but even the scientists didn't see this coming. They didn't predict it. The city did have plans in place for desalination plants and all that sort of thing, but that was only projected for 2020, and all of that's been brought forward now to try and make up for the gap. I mean, if the scientists couldn't have seen it coming, how could the city? We first heard about Day Zero around October last year, and I think even then it sounded ridiculous. Just the concept was like, “Sure, haha, Day Zero.” But then in January this year when the mayor said that it'd be, had become a probability, I don't know it suddenly, it did become very real.
Announcer: We have really reached a point of no return. 60% of Capetonians are carelessly using more than 87 liters of water per person per day, and it's quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care, and are sending all of us headlong to-towards Day Zero.
Sean: Okay so, Day Zero, currently scheduled for July 9th, 2018. What happens then?
Kristen: So the way the Day Zero scenario plays out, that's the day that the city shuts off water to the taps. This is not the day we run out of water, this is just the day the city shuts off water. And at that point, people start lining up at these water collection points and getting their 25 liters of water per person per day. That is supposed to extend the supply for about three months, I think is the estimate. What happens after that? I don't know. I mean, at that point, I'm assuming everybody's hoping that the winter rains would have started, and would have alleviated some of the problem. Now the city does have a number of have plans in place, desalination plants that kind of thing, that are supposed to come on online in the, in the coming months. The idea is that when these come online, that will then further extend the life of our, of our water supply.
Sean: Could you try and tell me what this looks like? How does Cape Town look different?
Kristen: I think one of the difficult things about managing a drought is that in the urban areas, it takes a long time for people to notice. The second you leave the city when you go to the farming areas, I mean there it's devastating, there it is very visible. Just these fellow farms and animals that are just you know, stick figures now and farmers having to make that decision. Do I let this animal slowly starve to death? What do I kill it now and save money, and save for the heartbreak? And in the city itself, you should be seeing gardens turning brown. You should be seeing empty swimming pools, but honestly in the richer areas, it pretty much looks the same. You've got your soccer fields and your golf courses that still look pretty Lush, and you've got a lot of gardens and swimming pools in the richest neighborhoods that don't look at all as if they've been touched by drought.
Sean: Hm, is that to say that this is very much affecting the wealthy and the poor differently, or is it like sort of like a tale of two water crises?
Kristen: There is definitely a different experience for the rich and the poor in this, in this drought. For one, the rich are able to buy their way out of most crises. Whether that's by, you know, paying exorbitant fees or by having a borehole put in your garden, or buy—being able to buy water tankers, so you can store rainwater coming down your gutters. The wealthy in the middle class in Cape Town are also the ones who are using the most water. I mean, our poor areas account for incredibly minimal water use, and that makes sense because they don't have reticulated water to their homes. This essentially meant that they've been living under Day Zero conditions for most of their lives. I mean, you speak to a lot of black South Africans, and they're in their 20s before they have a shower. They've spent their entire lives bathing out of buckets, because there is just not sufficient water delivery to the poorest areas.
Sean: It sounds like there could be some real tension, and maybe even some sort of like mild class warfare? Is that what you're looking at, or two people seem to be taking care of each other and coming together in this crisis or, or neither or both or what?
Kristen: I mean, it's difficult to tell. In some ways, I wouldn't think it would cause a class crisis, simply because Cape Town, like many South African cities, is still so stratified in its residential areas. So you would have all the wealthy queuing together at a tap, and you'd have all the poor queuing together at a tap, just because that's the way the neighborhoods are still, largely, still divided. But I can't imagine any system that requires 20,000 people to queue at a tap, to get 25 liters each per day is going to be a smooth running system. I just, I-I-I don't see, like, how humans go through that whole process without something breaking down somewhere along the way.
[Background music starts playing]
Sean: Do you feel sometimes now like, wow, it's kind of crazy that it took a crisis to make me think about this more practically?
Kristen: It's just saying, looking back how my relationship has changed with water. I can't comprehend how flippant I was about it. You know, even just this time last year it was, the draft was sort of this background noise, but I can't imagine going back to flushing the toilet after using it every time. I can't imagine back to flushing the toilet ever with clean drinking water. Things like that seem utterly ridiculous, now that we're in this crisis.
Sean: Kristen van Schie, she is a reporter in Cape Town, and this Day Zero situation in Cape Town is unprecedented, but the city is not alone. A water system close to you might be just a few droughts away from a shutdown. That's after the break. This is Today, Explained.
[Background music stops playing after 10 seconds]
[Midroll plays for one minute]
[Intro tune starts playing]
Sean: This is Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram. Peter Gleick knows a lot about water.
Peter: I'm president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, climatologist, hydrologist, National Academy of Sciences in the US, and the MacArthur Fellow.
Sean: Okay, so there's this situation in Cape Town where they might run out of water, which sounds crazy Peter, that sounds crazy.
Peter: It is crazy. It's unprecedented, one could say. We've never seen a major city have to literally turn off the taps before.
Sean: Huh, never in like the history of our developed modernized world?
Peter: Well, there are still hundreds of millions of people worldwide who never have access to safe water and sanitation. This is a global crisis overall. What's unique about this situation of course, is that this is a big city with a relatively sophisticated water system infrastructure, and pretty smart water management, and they're still in this situation.
Sean: Okay, so this is happening all the way in Cape Town, but could this happen anywhere else? I mean, I feel like we're always hearing about droughts in California where you live. Could this happen in California? or anywhere else in the world?
Peter: So, the disturbing thing about this is that Cape Town is not particularly unique. We're seeing around the world, more and more regions reaching what I've called Peak water. That is limits on the amount of water that nature delivers. Contrast that with growing populations and growing demand for water, and now unfortunately, human caused climate change, and all of those factors make it more and more likely in the coming years that we will see other regions of the world run into these kinds of crises.
Sean: Can you drop some names here? Who are we talking about? Where are we really at risk in the world?
Peter: Well, sure, we see cities like Mexico City, which are huge and reliant on increasingly unreliable difficult to obtain water, or Jakarta, which overdrafts its groundwater and is literally sinking because they're over pumping groundwater and the land is subsiding, or Tehran in Iran, which has had a extremely severe drought for many years combined with political problems with their water management system. I think it's possible to look on pretty much any continent and see regions where water scarcity is rearing its ugly head, and where we're not really taking into account new 21st century water risks.
Sean: You know, the situation in Cape Town. It seems like it's really not gonna affect the wealthiest residents. Is it, is it always going to break down this way? Where rich people still get to live lavishly with water and poor people will have to ration?
Peter: Maybe it's no surprise, but these kinds of crises always hurt disadvantaged communities and the poorest communities more than richer communities. It's the richer countries and regions of the world that have modern sophisticated water systems, and the poorest communities, even in the United States, like Flint, Michigan, when they suffer a problem with the water system, it's not the rich communities that suffer it's the poorest communities that suffer. In the Central Valley of California we've had for many years, for working communities that don't have access to safe water, because their water is contaminated with agricultural chemicals, and we've failed to solve that problem. That disparity between the rich and the poor, has always characterized water problems, and I think is going to get worse and worse in coming years.
Sean: Hm. So what do we do? What are the solutions here, Peter? What are we going to do to save our water supplies in these cities, and all over the world?
Peter: Well, so the bad news is, I do believe these water crises are going to continue to get worse in a lot of different places, but I also think there's good news out there and there are three things that I would look at, not just in Cape Town, but in any city or in any water system worldwide, that we ought to be doing and that, frankly, some places are already doing. All right.
Sean: All right.
[Outro tune starts playing in the background]
Sean: Let's do a quick PSA before we bounce. How to take care of your own water supply, so you don't end up in a Cape Town type of situation, starring hydrologist, climatologist, and Today, Explainthemologist Peter Gleick. Thing the first.
Peter: There are other sources of supply that we've sort of ignored. Like, treated wastewater. Cape Town uses 5% of its wastewater and they throw the rest away. But Israel uses 75% of its wastewater for agriculture and for other purposes.
Sean: So we got an update, it's actually 85 to 90%. So use that gray water folks. Thing the second.
Peter: We need to rethink what we're using our water for, and use it more efficiently. We can grow more food with less water. We can meet our urban demands for clean clothes, and flushing our toilet, and washing our dishes with less water.
Sean: Easy peasy. Turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth. Replace your lawn with a rock garden. Everybody loves rocks. Thing the third.
Peter: We absolutely have to accept the reality that the climate is changing because of human activities. Climate change will affect water resources, both supply and demand in the future, and stop ignoring it, and build it into our infrastructure, and build it into our water management, but we're, we're not doing any of those three things to the degree we need to.
Sean: Alright, tell veryone you know about science. Thanks to Peter Gleick, that's our show. I'm Sean Rameswaram, this is Today, Explained.
[Outro tune plays for another 13 seconds]
Luke: Hmm, let's take that again.
Sean: Okay, so it's gonna be like, and Today, Explainedisologist Peter Gleick, Explainedotologist, and Today, Explaindobologist gemologist, Today, Explainederologist, Today, Explainedastrologist Peter Gleick. [Laughing] He's gonna love this.
Luke: We are seeing how far 13 gallons of water will get you.
Sean: Like, a day?
Luke: Like a day.
Sean: And why are we doing this?
Luke: Because Cape Town is now down to 13 gallons per person of water per day
Sean: So that each person in Cape Town is limited to 13 gallons of water per day?
Luke: Yes.
Sean: But not 10 gallons, are they?
Luke: No no, 50 liters. They're not crazy.
Sean: Okay.
Luke: All right, what'd you do first this morning?
Sean: I used the toilet.
Luke: Did you flush?
Sean: If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down.
Luke: So you did flush?
Sean: Yes.
Luke: Four gallons.
Sean: Four gallons?! Cheese Louise.
Luke: Yeah, that's four gallons. So next up, what else did you do?
Sean: I brushed my teeth. I washed my face and my hands.
Luke: Okay, we'll call that a quarter gallon.
Sean: Okay, good, great.
Luke: Okay, continue.
Sean: I ate some cereal. I guess I then washed the bowl and I washed some other dishes that I had in the sink.
Luke: Okay, how long did that take you?
Sean: Five minutes.
Luke: With a low flow air rated sink?
Sean: Oh, you better believe a low flow air rated sink.
Luke: Alright we'll call that, that's eight gallons there.
Sean: Okay great. Is that good or bad? It sounds bad.
Luke: I mean, you've got 13 gallons. So what are you gonna do next?
Sean: Me? I'll take a shower.
Luke: All right, let's take a shower.
Sean: Sounds like it might be a short one.
Luke: I guess we'll see.
Sean: Okay.
Luke: I'm ready to go when you are. You just—
Sean: Okay. Ah, it's cold! Alright, I'm wetting down, I'm lathering. No, no time to waste, gotta get myself going. Oh, now it's really hot! Okay, I got shampoo in the hair, shampoo in the hair!
Luke: And, turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!
Sean: I got shampoo in my eye!
Luke: Alright, you're done.
Sean: I am so well over me.
Luke: Can I open the shower?
Sean: Sure.
Luke: How do you feel right now?
Sean: Incomplete.
Luke: This is all the water that you're allowed to use for the day so, you can't even like wink it, like a glass of water. You want to finish up your shower now?
Sean: Thanks, thanks Luke.
[Intro tune plays for 8 seconds]
Sean: This is Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and as you heard before I hit the shower. Cape Town South Africa is running out of water fast. But it was just a few years ago that the city was being recognized on this big global stage for how well it conserved water.
Announcer: The next C 40 award goes to the water conservation and demand management program from Cape Town. [Clapping]
Sean: And now, this model of sustainability is on the brink of shutting down all of its tabs.
Announcer female: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. This is the scenario Cape Town is now desperate to avoid.
[Background music starts playing]
Sean: So how to Cape Town get here, slowly?
Kristen: I mean, when the first water restrictions were introduced around the end of 2015 it was, it was kind of the obvious things like, don't fill up your pool all the time, and don't wash your car all the time.
Sean: And then, all at once.
Kristen: As the months went on, you did start thinking about it. You know, it was so much in the media, officials were talking about it so much.
Male newsreader: The current drought crisis in the Western Cape has resulted now in level five water restrictions being implemented by the City of Cape Town.
Sean: Kristen van Schie is a reporter in Cape Town, and she walked me through the city's water crisis.
Kristen: You felt you did have to take some kind of responsibility, so it was getting the leaks fixed. A couple months after that, it was showering with a bucket in the shower, and now we're at a stage where you're turning the water on to wet yourself, then turning the water off, then soaking up, but then turning the water back on to rinse yourself off. I'm only washing my hair once a week, because it just uses too much water, that you capture all the dirty grey water that you can, and you use that to flush your toilet, because the thought of flushing drinkable water down the toilet just seems atrocious now. It's all you think about throughout the course of the day, as you know, you brush your teeth, and you worry about the water that you're wasting. You go to a friend's house, and you worry about whether or not you should flush the toilet at their house. We'll just leave it standing. It's kind of inescapable right now, it's on everybody's minds.
[Background music stops playing after 8 seconds]
Kristen: Cape Town is this incredibly beautiful city. I moved here specifically for the natural beauty. You just have this, this mountain sort of towering over the rest of the city in the background, and these incredible ocean scapes in front of you. In the morning when you're walking through the city you have these clouds that just pour over the edge like a waterfall. I mean, it's, it's beautiful.
Sean: in 2015 Cape Town got this water conservation award. What were they doing right then? Because it seems like something's gone wrong since.
Kristen: So, the city gets its water from these six dams that lie outside of the city in what we call, catchment areas, where the rain falls. Around the mid 2000s, you had scientists warn in Cape Town that it didn't have enough water resources for the population growth that it was facing, but that advice was never really followed through. And, part of that has to do with the fact that it's not the City of Cape Town's job to increase the water supply that, that's a job that goes to national government, and because they were doing such a good job of keeping demand low in spite of population growth, it's something that wasn't a priority. Fast-forward to 2014-2015, and you have an El Niño event that affects all of Southern Africa.
Female newsreader: The devastating effects of El Niño. The lack of rain, accompanied by heatwaves.
Kristen: Namibia was hit, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, like name it. All the countries in the region.
Female newsreader: Millions are facing water shortages.
Kristen: Crops were down, dams were low. Cape Town has a different relationship with El Niño. While the rest of Southern Africa tends to get its rainfall in the summer periods, you know, these heavy thunderstorms, they just bunker down. Cape Town, instead, has a more Mediterranean like rainfall pattern, with the rainfall coming in these long slow showers over winter. You couldn't really have expected at the beginning to think that Cape Town would be that badly affected by El Niño, though rest of the region absolutely was, and I was in Cape Town in the winter of 2014, and it was an incredibly wet winter. The next year, the rains didn't come.
[Ominous tune starts playing in the background.]
Kristen: Or the year after that, or even the year after that. Where we have three consecutive winters now of, of poor rainfall. And one of the accusations you could lay is that you know, the city should have seen this coming, they should have prepared for this, but even the scientists didn't see this coming. They didn't predict it. The city did have plans in place for desalination plants and all that sort of thing, but that was only projected for 2020, and all of that's been brought forward now to try and make up for the gap. I mean, if the scientists couldn't have seen it coming, how could the city? We first heard about Day Zero around October last year, and I think even then it sounded ridiculous. Just the concept was like, “Sure, haha, Day Zero.” But then in January this year when the mayor said that it'd be, had become a probability, I don't know it suddenly, it did become very real.
Announcer: We have really reached a point of no return. 60% of Capetonians are carelessly using more than 87 liters of water per person per day, and it's quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care, and are sending all of us headlong to-towards Day Zero.
Sean: Okay so, Day Zero, currently scheduled for July 9th, 2018. What happens then?
Kristen: So the way the Day Zero scenario plays out, that's the day that the city shuts off water to the taps. This is not the day we run out of water, this is just the day the city shuts off water. And at that point, people start lining up at these water collection points and getting their 25 liters of water per person per day. That is supposed to extend the supply for about three months, I think is the estimate. What happens after that? I don't know. I mean, at that point, I'm assuming everybody's hoping that the winter rains would have started, and would have alleviated some of the problem. Now the city does have a number of have plans in place, desalination plants that kind of thing, that are supposed to come on online in the, in the coming months. The idea is that when these come online, that will then further extend the life of our, of our water supply.
Sean: Could you try and tell me what this looks like? How does Cape Town look different?
Kristen: I think one of the difficult things about managing a drought is that in the urban areas, it takes a long time for people to notice. The second you leave the city when you go to the farming areas, I mean there it's devastating, there it is very visible. Just these fellow farms and animals that are just you know, stick figures now and farmers having to make that decision. Do I let this animal slowly starve to death? What do I kill it now and save money, and save for the heartbreak? And in the city itself, you should be seeing gardens turning brown. You should be seeing empty swimming pools, but honestly in the richer areas, it pretty much looks the same. You've got your soccer fields and your golf courses that still look pretty Lush, and you've got a lot of gardens and swimming pools in the richest neighborhoods that don't look at all as if they've been touched by drought.
Sean: Hm, is that to say that this is very much affecting the wealthy and the poor differently, or is it like sort of like a tale of two water crises?
Kristen: There is definitely a different experience for the rich and the poor in this, in this drought. For one, the rich are able to buy their way out of most crises. Whether that's by, you know, paying exorbitant fees or by having a borehole put in your garden, or buy—being able to buy water tankers, so you can store rainwater coming down your gutters. The wealthy in the middle class in Cape Town are also the ones who are using the most water. I mean, our poor areas account for incredibly minimal water use, and that makes sense because they don't have reticulated water to their homes. This essentially meant that they've been living under Day Zero conditions for most of their lives. I mean, you speak to a lot of black South Africans, and they're in their 20s before they have a shower. They've spent their entire lives bathing out of buckets, because there is just not sufficient water delivery to the poorest areas.
Sean: It sounds like there could be some real tension, and maybe even some sort of like mild class warfare? Is that what you're looking at, or two people seem to be taking care of each other and coming together in this crisis or, or neither or both or what?
Kristen: I mean, it's difficult to tell. In some ways, I wouldn't think it would cause a class crisis, simply because Cape Town, like many South African cities, is still so stratified in its residential areas. So you would have all the wealthy queuing together at a tap, and you'd have all the poor queuing together at a tap, just because that's the way the neighborhoods are still, largely, still divided. But I can't imagine any system that requires 20,000 people to queue at a tap, to get 25 liters each per day is going to be a smooth running system. I just, I-I-I don't see, like, how humans go through that whole process without something breaking down somewhere along the way.
[Background music starts playing]
Sean: Do you feel sometimes now like, wow, it's kind of crazy that it took a crisis to make me think about this more practically?
Kristen: It's just saying, looking back how my relationship has changed with water. I can't comprehend how flippant I was about it. You know, even just this time last year it was, the draft was sort of this background noise, but I can't imagine going back to flushing the toilet after using it every time. I can't imagine back to flushing the toilet ever with clean drinking water. Things like that seem utterly ridiculous, now that we're in this crisis.
Sean: Kristen van Schie, she is a reporter in Cape Town, and this Day Zero situation in Cape Town is unprecedented, but the city is not alone. A water system close to you might be just a few droughts away from a shutdown. That's after the break. This is Today, Explained.
[Background music stops playing after 10 seconds]
[Midroll plays for one minute]
[Intro tune starts playing]
Sean: This is Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram. Peter Gleick knows a lot about water.
Peter: I'm president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, climatologist, hydrologist, National Academy of Sciences in the US, and the MacArthur Fellow.
Sean: Okay, so there's this situation in Cape Town where they might run out of water, which sounds crazy Peter, that sounds crazy.
Peter: It is crazy. It's unprecedented, one could say. We've never seen a major city have to literally turn off the taps before.
Sean: Huh, never in like the history of our developed modernized world?
Peter: Well, there are still hundreds of millions of people worldwide who never have access to safe water and sanitation. This is a global crisis overall. What's unique about this situation of course, is that this is a big city with a relatively sophisticated water system infrastructure, and pretty smart water management, and they're still in this situation.
Sean: Okay, so this is happening all the way in Cape Town, but could this happen anywhere else? I mean, I feel like we're always hearing about droughts in California where you live. Could this happen in California? or anywhere else in the world?
Peter: So, the disturbing thing about this is that Cape Town is not particularly unique. We're seeing around the world, more and more regions reaching what I've called Peak water. That is limits on the amount of water that nature delivers. Contrast that with growing populations and growing demand for water, and now unfortunately, human caused climate change, and all of those factors make it more and more likely in the coming years that we will see other regions of the world run into these kinds of crises.
Sean: Can you drop some names here? Who are we talking about? Where are we really at risk in the world?
Peter: Well, sure, we see cities like Mexico City, which are huge and reliant on increasingly unreliable difficult to obtain water, or Jakarta, which overdrafts its groundwater and is literally sinking because they're over pumping groundwater and the land is subsiding, or Tehran in Iran, which has had a extremely severe drought for many years combined with political problems with their water management system. I think it's possible to look on pretty much any continent and see regions where water scarcity is rearing its ugly head, and where we're not really taking into account new 21st century water risks.
Sean: You know, the situation in Cape Town. It seems like it's really not gonna affect the wealthiest residents. Is it, is it always going to break down this way? Where rich people still get to live lavishly with water and poor people will have to ration?
Peter: Maybe it's no surprise, but these kinds of crises always hurt disadvantaged communities and the poorest communities more than richer communities. It's the richer countries and regions of the world that have modern sophisticated water systems, and the poorest communities, even in the United States, like Flint, Michigan, when they suffer a problem with the water system, it's not the rich communities that suffer it's the poorest communities that suffer. In the Central Valley of California we've had for many years, for working communities that don't have access to safe water, because their water is contaminated with agricultural chemicals, and we've failed to solve that problem. That disparity between the rich and the poor, has always characterized water problems, and I think is going to get worse and worse in coming years.
Sean: Hm. So what do we do? What are the solutions here, Peter? What are we going to do to save our water supplies in these cities, and all over the world?
Peter: Well, so the bad news is, I do believe these water crises are going to continue to get worse in a lot of different places, but I also think there's good news out there and there are three things that I would look at, not just in Cape Town, but in any city or in any water system worldwide, that we ought to be doing and that, frankly, some places are already doing. All right.
Sean: All right.
[Outro tune starts playing in the background]
Sean: Let's do a quick PSA before we bounce. How to take care of your own water supply, so you don't end up in a Cape Town type of situation, starring hydrologist, climatologist, and Today, Explainthemologist Peter Gleick. Thing the first.
Peter: There are other sources of supply that we've sort of ignored. Like, treated wastewater. Cape Town uses 5% of its wastewater and they throw the rest away. But Israel uses 75% of its wastewater for agriculture and for other purposes.
Sean: So we got an update, it's actually 85 to 90%. So use that gray water folks. Thing the second.
Peter: We need to rethink what we're using our water for, and use it more efficiently. We can grow more food with less water. We can meet our urban demands for clean clothes, and flushing our toilet, and washing our dishes with less water.
Sean: Easy peasy. Turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth. Replace your lawn with a rock garden. Everybody loves rocks. Thing the third.
Peter: We absolutely have to accept the reality that the climate is changing because of human activities. Climate change will affect water resources, both supply and demand in the future, and stop ignoring it, and build it into our infrastructure, and build it into our water management, but we're, we're not doing any of those three things to the degree we need to.
Sean: Alright, tell veryone you know about science. Thanks to Peter Gleick, that's our show. I'm Sean Rameswaram, this is Today, Explained.
[Outro tune plays for another 13 seconds]
Luke: Hmm, let's take that again.
Sean: Okay, so it's gonna be like, and Today, Explainedisologist Peter Gleick, Explainedotologist, and Today, Explaindobologist gemologist, Today, Explainederologist, Today, Explainedastrologist Peter Gleick. [Laughing] He's gonna love this.
( Vox Media Podcast Network )
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