Catch a wake up!
Cape Town’s boreholes are teaching us how to avoid a commons tragedy
and, in the process, possibly practise good-neighbourliness over avarice.
By Mike Muller
T
he water crisis in Cape Town is
providing a valuable service to
the rest of the country. It is raising
issues that we should all be thinking
and talking about. And this may be the
most important lesson of them all: we
have to start making water everybody’s
business.
For the first time in quite a while,
people are asking where their water
comes from. In Cape Town, they talk
about the levels of their different dams
and how fast it is dropping. To comply
with drought restrictions, Capetonians
have learnt how little 50 litres of water
— the daily allowance for domestic
consumers — actually is. Next, they
learnt that you can use it two or three
times, the last time being to flush the
toilet.
People are suddenly desperately
interested in water quality and how to
make seawater drinkable. They also
now know that it would be cheaper and
Everyone is becoming more conscious of water usage
since Cape Town’s plight became evident.
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Water Sewage & Effluent March/April 2018
easier simply to treat wastewater and
put it back into the system again — if
they can do it in Windhoek, and even
make a very good beer from it, surely
Cape Town can do it too?
A new focus of conversation is about
the use of groundwater in urban areas.
Many residents of suburban Cape Town
have drilled boreholes or installed well
points — the waiting list for contractors
is now a year long. But this has raised
the spectre of some households