International South Africa's Water Crisis: Taps Have Run Dry Across Johannesburg

Man, I can't even imagine how to live on 13 gallons of water a day and still feel like a civilized human being, especially when it comes to flushing the toilet with a bucket.



South Africans have gotten used to a strained sense of civilization ;)

A sense of humour helps.
 
So...
Cape Town is flooding:

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@Arkain2K
 
From the Worlds first heart transplant in the 1960's and having a currency that was outperforming the dollar by the 1970's , to this.
 
Man, I can't even imagine how to live on 13 gallons of water a day and still feel like a civilized human being, especially when it comes to flushing the toilet with a bucket.





I can't imagine their conditions too, 13 gallons a day? Damn, the worst I have experienced was during the early 90s when I am still a kid living in the suburbs of Manila during the Power and water crisis, there was a month where me and my mom have to fetch water at the plaza and push a cart with barrels of water for like two blocks everybody does that in the neighborhood for like two straight months during summer until water supply normalized. But atleast we don't have to ration water like that 13 gallon per day limit.

Looking back at it I don't think I can survived that again
 
I can't imagine their conditions too, 13 gallons a day? Damn, the worst I have experienced was during the early 90s when I am still a kid living in the suburbs of Manila during the Power and water crisis, there was a month where me and my mom have to fetch water at the plaza and push a cart with barrels of water for like two blocks everybody does that in the neighborhood for like two straight months during summer until water supply normalized. But atleast we don't have to ration water like that 13 gallon per day limit.

Looking back at it I don't think I can survived that again

Let's hope this three-year drought shocked them into planning long-term solution for next time.

I highly doubt it though. History has shown that as soon as the rain begins to fall, politicians would immediately get distracted by other things.


Cape Town's water plan is too narrow, says expert - advises long term plan
Melanie Gosling, Correspondent | 2018-04-17

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Cape Town's first test borehole into the Cape Flats aquifer.

UCT academic Dr Kevin Winter says the City council's proposed 26.9% water price hike, which has drawn howls of protest from Capetonians, is not big enough to shift the city out of the water crisis in the long term.

"I think the increase is not nearly enough. I am sure the City is going to have to continue to subsidise actual water costs and services very carefully," he said.

Winter, chair of UCT's Water Task Team and senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, said one needed to look beyond the shock of the new price for water in the City's draft 2018/19 budget and think about water security for Cape Town in the long term.

But Capetonians could not pay for all that was needed, so the City council would have to find creative ways of getting the necessary billions to become a water secure city.

Winter criticised the draft budget for its lack of detail about how the budget money would be spent on new water projects.

"There is a lot going on in this budget, but it is the detail that is going to tell the story, rather than gross increases. I want to see how the budget is going to shift the City toward a more resilient, water-sensitive strategy, rather than merely balancing the books that tend to focus on infrastructure, maintenance and operations alone," Winter said.

Missing elements

However, a lack of detail on how the capital budget would be spent was missing from the City's draft budget.

He said there were several other elements missing if Cape Town was going to make the shift to becoming a "climate proof, water resilient city", rather than a city that went from one water crisis to the next.

It appeared that the budget did not look at this long-term shift. Rather, it had been drawn up on the assumption that three years of good rain would fill the dams and the City would be able to carry on supply as normal.

What was needed was a 30- to 50-year water plan for Cape Town, with future budgets agreeing on a principled plan.

"I can't see how the new budget is creating a new vision for a water scarce city. I am not sure we are taking this current drought as a warning seriously and keeping our eyes on the long-term consequences of climate change and the urgent need to adjust," Winter said.

He supported the City's efforts to continue managing Capetonians' water demand, which had been significantly reduced, as well as the City finding more water sources and reusing water.

However, one of several crucial elements that was missing in the budget if the City were really embarking on a road to become more water secure, was that there was no allocation for managing stormwater and using it to recharge aquifers.

"Where are the targets around stormwater management? They don't mention it at all. This is the time when we need to be thinking about things like this."

Winter said stormwater could be included as a new water source to recharge the Cape Flats aquifer.

"I think it is a critical component of understanding the City's water resources, not only because it is part of the recharge of the aquifers, but because it is a source of surface and groundwater pollution, as well as a transporter of solid waste and contaminated water to rivers, to waterways and to the sea.

"Stormwater management needs a much greater budget, and needs to be linked to the bulk water supply chain rather that to roads and transport. Thus far, it has been treated as having nuisance value rather than as a key element of water resource management to the City," Winter said.

'Rivers in a shocking condition'

There was also no allocation in the draft budget for a programme to monitor the abstraction of water from private boreholes, nor for the monitoring of the Cape Flats aquifer, or for the rehabilitation of urban river systems.

"Our rivers and waterways in the city are in a shocking condition."

The budget neglected the importance of nature-based solutions for water quality. The Unesco report released last month on this topic "seemed to be lost" on the City council.

Another problem Winter highlighted was that, although the City had called for public comment, it was very difficult to interrogate and make comments because there was very little detail on how the money was to be spent on the new water projects.

"They list projects, but with no details about what the projects are. They have got to be specific. We have got to be able to see what they are spending the money on in detail, not just on 'desalination'. I am sure that there are calculations in the background, but we are not privy to that," Winter said.

He believes Capetonians cannot pay for the entire range of new projects needed to shift the city out of water crises in the long term.

The City council would have to find creative ways to engage with the private sector and form "citizen partnerships" to get the money needed to build Cape Town into a city that had enough water.

"The City needs to lead rather than wait for national government resources and competencies. It is time for a new model," Winter said.

Asked for comment, the City media department said it was still waiting for a reply on what Winter considered was missing from the budget.

Regarding the lack of details in how the capital budget would be spent, the City referred News24 to the budget documents online, which are the same documents that Winter was referring to when he said they lacked the detail necessary to be able to interrogate the budget.

Winter said he had raised this with City officials, who said detailed breakdowns of the cost of new water projects did exist, but more work needed to be done on them, which made it difficult to reveal all the details at this stage.

Regarding the monitoring of borehole water, the City said this fell under the national Department of Water and Sanitation, not the City.

https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/...w-says-expert-advises-long-term-plan-20180417
 
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<FookIsThatGuy>

Don't feed my troll posting. That post is from awhile back when there was a lot of closeted racist post during that week. Alt-right posters like to use cuck a lot, so it was just a simple flame post.
 
Sewage, Icebergs May Hold Answers to Cape Town Water Crisis
By Michael Cohen May 7, 2018​
  • City risks running out of water next year if winter rains fail
  • Water usage has more than halved over past three years
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The doomsday scenario of Cape Town’s taps running dry has been averted this year, after its 4 million residents slashed their water consumption and supply was cut off to farmers, but the crisis confronting South Africa’s second-biggest city is far from over.

The city’s six main dams are now on average just 21 percent full, almost 2 percentage points less than they were a year ago. If winter rains disappoint and a three-year drought doesn’t break, the threat of so-called “Day Zero” -- when the water taps will run dry -- will loom large again by early 2019.

These are among the options being considered to address the water shortfall:

1. Drive demand down further
Higher tariffs, usage restrictions and a hard-hitting advertising campaign have already driven consumption down to 519 million liters (137 million gallons) a day, from 1.2 billion liters three years ago. That’s still higher than the city’s target of 450 million liters. Further price increases are in the offing, and the city also intends installing more devices that restrict the water flow to households exceeding their daily quotas of 50 liters a person. While those measures may help curb demand, many households and businesses have limited scope to save more.

2. Build more desalination plants
Three temporary small-scale desalination plants that will produce a total of 16 million liters of water a day are nearly complete. While the city has so far steered clear of big plants because of high costs, environmental concerns and the risk that they won’t be needed if there is adequate rainfall, it’s now weighing whether to build a facility that could provide as much as 150 million liters of water a day from 2021. Another 20 million-liter plant that could be operational from 2020 is also being considered.

3. Recycle water
The city intends building a temporary sewage recycling plant that would yield 10 million liters of water a day from late this year and is mulling the construction of a permanent facility that could process as much as 90 million liters daily from 2020. The estimated cost of making waste water potable is about 7.50 rand per 1,000 liters -- just over half the cost of effective desalination -- because the plants use less electricity and wouldn’t require extensive marine works, according to the city’s Water Outlook 2018 report.

4. Use more ground water
About 12 million liters of water is being tapped daily from an underground aquifer and there are plans to drill into several others and increase the yield to as much as 150 million liters. It’s cheaper and quicker to tap water from the ground than to purify or desalinate it and it’s also the most environmentally friendly way of bolstering the supply provided extraction is kept to sustainable levels, according to the city.

5. Tow in icebergs from Antarctica
Salvage expert Nick Sloane has proposed using tugboats and a tanker to guide an iceberg more than 1,000 nautical miles from the waters of the Antarctic to offshore Saldanha Bay, north of Cape Town, where it could be run aground and harvested. A single iceberg could provide about 130 million liters of water daily for a year and the cost of moving it would be about half of that of desalination, he says. The city has said it won’t consider the proposal because it is too risky and expensive, according to News24, a Cape Town-based website.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...to-fail-finance-giant-faces-a-china-clampdown
 
Cape Town approves 10-year water plan
June 18, 2019



JOHANNESBURG - Cape Town is planning for the worst-case water scenario.

The city's water supply has stabilised significantly over the last year and now the Cape government has approved a new 10-year strategy.

This includes a permanent desalination plant.

The city that almost ran out of the water, is now implementing the costly plan to ensure another Day Zero scenario is near-impossible.

City of Cape Town Mayco member Xanthea Limberg estimates between R5.4 and R5.8-billion needs to be invested over the next 10 years.

"We are estimating approximately between R5.4 and R5.8 billion that needs to be invested over the next 10 years to ensure that we can add an additional 300 million litres of water to the city to sustain our growing demand."

There will still be a heavy reliance on dam water and by extension, steady rainfall.

According to the eNCA weather centre, the current season has been disappointing so far.

"Well on the 12th of June the provincial average for Western cape dams was 48%, with Theewaterskloof, Steenbras Lower and Wemmershoek around 40% and the Berg River Dam at just below 73%. This year between January and May we have had below average rainfall for the Western Cape. Unfortunately, seasonal forecast models perform poorly for the winter rainfall regions, but they are optimistic with average to above average rainfall expected for June and July."

https://www.enca.com/news/cape-town-approves-10-year-water-plan
 


 
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So I read on here that they cut water for farmers too wont that effect food production and lead to famine?


Russian gov funded RussiaToday did a nice little documentary on the Boer farmer deaths and inequality in South Africa that is driving it



I think a lot of people see all White South Africans as either rich but there's plenty of poor look at this..

The refugees no one wants...

https://www.eutimes.net/2016/02/the-refugees-no-one-wants/


Why is it that Europe that has taken in millions of migrants from Middle East, Africa but these people who's roots are in Europe aren't going there?
 
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Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ Water Crisis, One Year Later
Christian Alexander | Apr 12, 2019



In January 2018, when officials in Cape Town announced that the city of 4 million people was three months away from running out of municipal water, the world was stunned. Labelled “Day Zero” by local officials and brought on by three consecutive years of anemic rainfall, April 12, 2018, was to be the date of the largest drought-induced municipal water failure in modern history.

Photos of parched-earth dams and residents lining up to collect spring water splashed across news sites. The city’s contingency plan called for the entire population to collect its water—a maximum of a two-minute-shower’s-worth a day per person—from 200 centralized water centers, each serving the population equivalent of an MLS soccer stadium.

Then April 12th came and went, and news of the crisis evaporated.

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Sand blows across a normally submerged area at Theewaterskloof Dam near Cape Town, January 20, 2018.​


One year on, Cape Town has apparently made it through the worst of a historic drought without turning off the taps, although the water supply is still tenuous. How the city managed to evade disaster—a combination of water conservation and efficiency measures, smarter use of data, and a little help from Mother Nature—serves as a largely hopeful precedent for cities globally facing increasing risk of extreme environmental events. Still, serious challenges in establishing a resilient and sustainable water supply system for Cape Town remain.

90 critical days

The countdown to Day Zero was 90 days. So what did Cape Town do to beat it? Unsurprisingly, it was not a silver bullet but a barrage of efforts that averted disaster. One big boost came in February 2018, when the national government throttled allocation of water in the region earmarked for agriculture, allowing more to flow to urban residents. The same month, farmers also agreed to divert additional water stored for agricultural purposes to the city.

However, the city’s conservation efforts were as important, and more remarkable. Cape Town’s government ramped up water tariffs and enforcement of prohibitions on heavy users, prohibiting use of municipal water for swimming pools, lawns, and similar non-essential uses. The city’s government also implemented a new water-pressure system in January, saving roughly 10 percent of overall municipal water consumption.

The effect was stunning. Cape Town’s municipal water-use levels historically oscillate throughout the year, showing up on a graph as a standing wave pattern with troughs coinciding with wet winters, and peaks mirroring the dry summer months when people rely more on taps for water. Like an ocean wave crashing onto shore, this wave pattern fizzled out as Cape Town implemented drought restrictions, cutting its peak usage by more than half in three years.

The January 2018 announcement alone galvanized a 30-percent drop in residential consumption after a steady but slower decline in earlier stages of the drought, according to City of Cape Town statistics.

A city changes its habits

Technical fixes and regulatory controls implemented by the municipality were important to curbing water consumption, but reaching such levels of conservation would not have been possible without large-scale cooperation by a wide swath of residents, businesses, and other stakeholders.

“It doesn’t matter how much technical expertise you’ve got, but you actually have to stand back and understand the system more broadly,” notes Gina Ziervogel of the University of Cape Town, who has researched the crisis. For the city, this meant using data more effectively to prompt people to save water.

Starting in 2017, the municipality had begun ratcheting up its drought-awareness campaign, publishing weekly updates on regional dam levels and water consumption and using electronic boards on freeways to notify drivers of how many days of water supply Cape Town had left. Then, in January 2018 and with Day Zero looming, the city got more aggressive. In addition to announcing its Day Zero countdown, the city launched a city-wide water map to show water consumption on a household level, allowing people to compare their consumption to their neighbors and the rest of the city.

Heightened outreach regarding the crisis prompted wide discussion: The municipality’s weekly water report became a regular topic at social gathenings and on the radio. Governmental and civic organizations published water-saving techniques, and people traded tips on social media. In an unusual turn of events, techniques used in the poor, water-strapped township areas gained traction in wealthier areas.

Prompted by new water-use tariffs, businesses also began increased efforts to communicate the need to save water to customers and employees. Bathroom signs explaining “If it’s yellow, let it mellow...” became ubiquitous in restaurants and bars, while startup and corporate types initiated “dirty shirt” challenges to see who could go the most days without washing their work shirt.

Crisis averted (for now)

By the end of March 2018, the emergency efforts had provided a small additional buffer in the city’s water reserves, allowing city officials to push back Day Zero beyond the upcoming rainy season. In June 2018, the region saw average rainfall for the first time in four years. With the rain, dam levels rose, and officials were able to call off Day Zero indefinitely.

Cape Town’s multi-pronged effort to stave off Day Zero succeeded. Still, the challenges to achieving water security persist. Although dam levels are above the lows experienced during the drought, they remain below pre-drought years and currently stand at 50 percent of capacity. Meanwhile, daily water use for the city has crept higher over the past year.

Furthermore, disparities in access to water in Cape Town continue to be related to extreme economic inequality, which generally runs along the racial lines established during South Africa’s colonial and apartheid eras. For a large proportion of Cape Town’s poor citizens, whose only normal access to water is a communal tap, Day Zero remains a constant reality. Combine this with a complex political climate and historical distrust of state policies, and it is easy to understand that a sustained unified effort to conserve water is fraught with tension.

Cape Town is making a longer-term effort to diversify its water resources, but that too is prompting concerns. Projects to desalinate ocean water and tap the aquifer beneath the city have proven far more expensive than initially thought, and have also faced questions about their environmental impacts on local ecosystems and overall sustainability. An increase in private wells drilled by wealthier households has added pressure to the future availability of this source. Although plans for both desalination and groundwater extraction are progressing, neither alone will solve Cape Town’s water issues.

For now, the city and its residents are still enduring moderate drought conditions. Urban water restrictions remain in place, although less strict than before, and the legacy of the drought can still be seen all around Cape Town. Many businesses continue to remind customers to restrict their usage in signs taped to bathroom mirrors and above toilets. That’s probably just as well—water-scarcity issues are not likely to go anywhere, considering the increased risks of drought caused by climate change and population growth.

As for other cities facing similar resource crises: Ziervogel advises “to make sure you’ve got those relationships and partnerships in place so that when a crisis hits you can actually draw on those partnerships.”

https://www.citylab.com/environment...ter-conservation-south-africa-drought/587011/
 
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I can't imagine their conditions too, 13 gallons a day? Damn, the worst I have experienced was during the early 90s when I am still a kid living in the suburbs of Manila during the Power and water crisis, there was a month where me and my mom have to fetch water at the plaza and push a cart with barrels of water for like two blocks everybody does that in the neighborhood for like two straight months during summer until water supply normalized. But atleast we don't have to ration water like that 13 gallon per day limit.

Looking back at it I don't think I can survived that again

Thank god Duterte is making the country great again!
 
Luckily I am in Johannesburg - we've had rain. A friend was in the Cape over the holidays and came back with horror stories of mud running from the taps. Restaurants no longer provide tap water.

While the Cape is experiencing the worst drought in recorded history, they're suffering there almost as much because of inadequate planning - at the moment it is unclear if the national (ANC) or provincial (DA) government is primarily to blame for the failure to plan.
I'd bet the ANC, but I think they're shittier than shit, so my judgement is probably not objective.

https://m.news24.com/Analysis/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-20171214



There was talk a few months back of possibly having to deploy the military in the Cape to enforce water restriction.

Oh no! It's your turn now!

Pretty wild that nearly half of Johannesburg’s fresh water supply is simply wasted from broken pipes.

Taps have run dry across South Africa’s largest city in an unprecedented water crisis

BY MOGOMOTSI MAGOME | March 21, 2024



JOHANNESBURG (AP) — For two weeks, Tsholofelo Moloi has been among thousands of South Africans lining up for water as the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, confronts an unprecedented collapse of its water system affecting millions of people.

Residents rich and poor have never seen a shortage of this severity. While hot weather has shrunk reservoirs, crumbling infrastructure after decades of neglect is also largely to blame. The public’s frustration is a danger sign for the ruling African National Congress, whose comfortable hold on power since the end of apartheid in the 1990s faces its most serious challenge in an election this year.

A country already famous for its hourslong electricity shortages is now adopting a term called “watershedding” — the practice of going without water, from the term loadshedding, or the practice of going without power.

Moloi, a resident of Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg, isn’t sure she or her neighbors can take much more.

They and others across South Africa’s economic hub of about 6 million people line up day after day for the arrival of municipal tanker trucks delivering water. Before the trucks finally arrived the day before, a desperate Moloi had to request water from a nearby restaurant.

There was no other alternative. A five-liter (1.3-gallon) bottle of water sells for 25 rand ($1.30), an expensive exercise for most people in a country where over 32% of the population is unemployed.

“We are really struggling,” Moloi said. “We need to cook, and children must also attend school. We need water to wash their clothes. It’s very stressful.”

90


Residents of Johannesburg and surrounding areas are long used to seeing water shortages — just not across the whole region at once.

Over the weekend, water management authorities with Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria, told officials from both cities that the failure to reduce water consumption could result in a total collapse of the water system. That means reservoirs would drop below 10% capacity and would need to be shut down for replenishment.

That could mean weeks without water from taps — at a time when the hot weather is keeping demand for water high. The arrival of chilly winter in the Southern Hemisphere is still weeks away.

No drought has been officially declared, but officials are pleading with residents to conserve what water they can find. World Water Day on Friday is another reminder of the wider need to conserve.

90


Outraged activists and residents call this a crisis years in the making. They blame officials’ poor management and the failure to maintain aging water infrastructure. Much of it dates to the years just after the end of apartheid, when basic services were expanded to the country’s Black population in an era of optimism.

The ANC long rode on that enthusiasm, but now many South Africans are asking what happened. In Johannesburg, run by a coalition of political parties, anger is against authorities in general as people wonder how maintenance of some of the country’s most important economic engines went astray.

A report published last year by the national department of water and sanitation is damning. Its monitoring of water usage by municipalities found that 40% of Johannesburg’s water is wasted through leaks, which includes burst pipes.

In recent days, even residents of Johannesburg’s more affluent and swimming pool-dotted suburbs have found themselves relying on the arrival of municipal water tankers, which came as a shock to some.

90


Residents in one neighborhood, Blairgowrie, came out to protest after lacking water for nearly two weeks.

A local councilor in Soweto, Lefa Molise, told The Associated Press he was not optimistic that the water shortage would be resolved soon.

Water cuts have become so frequent that he urges residents to reserve any supply they can find, especially when he said authorities give little or no warning about upcoming shortages.

The water tankers are not enough to keep residents supplied, he added.

An older resident, Thabisile Mchunu, said her taps have been dry since last week. She now hauls what water she can find in 20-liter buckets.

“The sad thing is that we don’t know when our taps are going to be wet again,” she said.

90


Rand Water, the government entity that supplies water to more than a dozen municipalities in Gauteng province, this week pleaded with residents to reduce their consumption. The interlinked reservoirs supplying its system are now at 30% capacity, and high demand on any of them affects them all.

Even South Africa’s notoriously troubled electricity system has played a role in the water problem, at least in part.

On Tuesday, Johannesburg Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda said a power station that supplies electricity to one of the city’s major water pumping stations had been struck by lighting, causing the station to fail.

 
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