Today, Explained - Countdown to Day Zero

Episode Date: February 22, 2018

Cape Town is just a few months away from being the first major city to shut off its taps in the history of the modern world. Day Zero - the day Capetonians in South Africa will need to line up at water distribution points for daily water rations - is currently scheduled for July 9th. Reporter Kristen van Schie tells Sean Rameswaram how the three-year drought is drastically changing life for millions of Capetonians. Plus three tips to ward off a water crisis in your own city from hydrologist Peter Gleick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good sleep can be elusive, but a good mattress doesn't have to be. Check out the mattresses over at Mattress Firm. They've got lots of different mattress brands to choose from, which is scientifically proven to increase your chances of finding one that's right for you. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep. 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? We are seeing how far 13 gallons of water will get you. Like a day? Like a day. And why are we doing this? Because Cape Town is now down to 13 gallons per person of water per day. So each person in Cape Town is limited to 13 gallons of water per day? Yes but not saying gallons are they yeah no 50 liters they're not crazy okay all right what did you do first this morning um i i used the toilet did you flush if it's yellow let it mellow

if it's brown flush it down so uh you did flush yes four gallons four gallons geez louise yeah it's four gallons. Okay. So next up, what else did you do? I brushed my teeth. I washed my face and my hands. Okay, we'll call that a quarter gallon. Okay, good, great. Okay, continue.

I ate some cereal. I guess I then, I washed the bowl and I washed some other dishes that I had in the sink. Okay, how long did that take you? Oh, five minutes. With a low flow aerated sink? Oh, you better believe a low flow aerated sink. All right, we'll call that, that's eight gallons there. Okay, great. Is that good or bad?

It sounds bad. I mean, you've got 13 gallons, so what are you going to do next? Maybe I'll take a shower? All right, let's take a shower. Sounds like it might be a short one. I guess we'll see. Okay. I'm ready to go when you are.

You just... Oh, it's cold. All right, I'm gonna go see. Okay. I'm ready to go when you are. You just... Oh, it's cold! Alright, I'm wetting down, I'm lathering. No time to waste here. I'm getting my soap going. Oh, now it's really hot! Okay, I got shampoo in the hair. Shampoo in the hair.

And... Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off! I got shampoo in the eye! Alright, you're done. I have soap all over me. Can I open the shower?

Yeah. Can I open the shower? Yeah. Can I open the shower? Yeah. Can I open the shower? Yeah. Can I open the shower? Yeah. And turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off! I got shampoo in the eye! Alright, you're done. I am soap all over me. Can I open the shower?

Sure. How do you feel right now? Incomplete. Fun fact, this is all the water that you're allowed to use for the day. So, you can't even wink it like a glass of water. Okay. You want to finish up your shower now? I think so. Thanks. Thanks, Luke. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm.

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. The next C40 award goes to the Water Conservation and Demand Management Program from Cape Town. And now this model of sustainability is on the brink of shutting down all of its taps. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. This is the scenario Cape Town is now desperate to avoid. So how did Cape Town get here? Slowly. I mean, when the first water restrictions were introduced around the end of 2015, 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. And then all at once. 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. The current drought crisis in the Western Cape has resulted now in level five water restrictions being implemented by the city of Cape Town. Kristen Van Shee is a reporter in Cape Town, and she walked me through the city's water crisis. 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 soaping up, 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. Like 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 is 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 or just leave it standing. It's kind of inescapable right now, it's on everybody's minds. Cape Town is this incredibly beautiful city. I moved here specifically for the natural beauty. You just have 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 beautiful. In 2015, Cape Town got this water conservation award what were they doing right then because

it seems like something's gone wrong since 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 warning 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'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 Nino event that affects all of southern Africa. The devastating effects of El Nino. The lack of rain accompanied by heat waves. Namibia was hit, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, like name it, all the countries in the region. Millions are facing water shortages. Crops were down, dams were low. Cape Town has a different relationship with El Nino. While the rest of southern Africa tends to get its rainfall in the summer periods, you know, these heavy thunderstorms, they just bucket 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 Nino, though the 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. Or the year after that. Or even the year after that. We've had three consecutive winters now 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 had become a probability I don't know I it suddenly it did become very real we have really reached a point of no return 60 percent of Capitonians are callously 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 towards day zero. Okay, so day zero currently scheduled for July 9th, 2018, what happens then? 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 is hoping that the winter rains would have started and would have alleviated some of the problem. Now, the city does have a number of plans in place, desalination plans, that kind of thing that are supposed to come online in the coming months. The idea is that when these come online, that will then further extend the life of our water supply. Could you try and tell me what this looks like? How does

Cape Town look different? 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 stick figures now, and farmers having to make that decision,

do I let this animal slowly starve to death or do I kill it now and save money and save further 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.

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? There's definitely a different experience for the rich and the poor 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 by being able to buy water tankers so you can store rainwater coming down your gutters. The wealthy and 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.

It's 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. 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 do people seem to be taking care of each other and coming together in this crisis or neither or both or what? 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 don't see like how humans go through that whole process without something breaking down somewhere along the way. 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? It's insane 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, the drought 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. Kristen Van Shee. 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. How's your sleep? If it's not going so well, check out Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm, colloquially known as America's Neighborhood Mattress Store, can help you stretch your budget a little further when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep. These are mattress experts, but they're not just mattress experts. Mattress Firm can help you build your bed from headboards to adjustable bases to sheets. And you guys, they even have bedroom decor. Mattress Firm's got you covered in all of the ways.

Go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to see their latest deals. Mattress Firm offers 120 night sleep trial to ensure perfection and 120-night low price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price. Again, go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how your sleeping could be improved. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Peter Glick knows a lot about water. I'm president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, climatologist, hydrologist, National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., and a MacArthur fellow. Okay, so there's this situation in Cape Town where they might run out of water, which sounds crazy, Peter. That sounds crazy. It is crazy. It's unprecedented, one could say. We've never seen a major city have to literally turn off the taps before.

Huh. Never in, like, the history of our developed, modernized world. 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. 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? 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, contrasted 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. Could you drop some names here? Who are we talking about? Where are we really at risk in the world? 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 overpumping

groundwater and the land is subsiding, or Tehran in Iran, which has had an 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. You know, the situation in Cape Town,

it seems like it's really not gonna affect the wealthiest residents. 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? 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 poor 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 the coming years. 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? 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. 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 explained demologist Peter Glick. Thing the first. 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. So we got an update. It's actually 85 to 90%. So use that gray water, folks. Thing the second. 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. 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. 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. 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 not doing any of those three things to the degree we need to.

All right, tell everyone you know about science. Thanks to Peter Glick. That's our show. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. from this is today explained let's take that again okay so it's gonna be like and today explained zoologist peter glick explained autologist and today explained zoologist, Peter Glick. Explained otologist. And today explained obologist, gemologist. Today explained urologist. Today explained astrologist, Peter Glick. He's going to love this. Hope you enjoyed the podcast, y'all. And hope you've got a good mattress.

But if you don't, please do yourself a favor and head to Mattress Firm. They are really good at mattresses. Your budget stretches further when you shop at America's Neighborhood Mattress Store. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep.