We have always been able to augment further supply by building an additional dam, but not so anymore.  There is not another single place or any more river water that can possibly be found anywhere in the Western Cape for augmenting supply. The Western Cape is simply dammed out of water.  The rest of the country is in no better condition, so we cannot go looking elsewhere to steal this precious resource.

Two ways of augmenting supply to Cape Town have recently been mooted by the minister of DWA (Department of Water Affairs) Buyelwa Sonjica, viz. the desalination of sea water and pumping water out of the Table Mountain aquifer. Simply put, both of these augmentation systems are not sustainable, and should not and must not be pursued. The former is too energy hungry, and the latter means pumping fossil water from the TM aquifer. Clearly these are not options for a way of finding water for Cape Town.

What is studiously being ignored by Minister Sonjica is our ability to use less water, as well as ways to augment our own supply. Minister Sonjica will not be found encouraging citizens to harvest water; mainly because this would not mean any revenue for her department.

However for this to work, we need a few things to fall into place, which things will happen sooner than later.  These are:

• The inability of our city council to process sewerage.  This really is the case already with Cape Town City Council only able to process 65% of the effluent running to their sewerage treatment works. The rest of the semi and untreated sewerage runs into rivers etc.
• The inability of the Department of Water Affairs (the owners of the water in our dams) to meet the increasing demand for water for Cape Town from the rivers in the Western Cape.
• The inability of the City Council to make our drinking water potable.  In this regard, there are a burgeoning number of municipalities around South Africa who admit that they cannot clean the water in the pipelines to a drinkable standard.  Among other reasons for Cape Town is the growing number of informal settlements in our catchment areas. One only has to look at Hout Bay and the condition of the Disa River – the deadly condition of this water kills every living thing in the river and estuary.  The faecal coli (EC) numbers are 9 billion per 100 millilitres of water.  Unacceptable standards are any number higher than 350 per 100 ml.
• Realization by Cape Town City that there is simply not enough money budgeted in the near and distant future for sewage treatment.  We need 6 billion Rand right now to upgrade existing and build new sewage treatment works.  There is not more than 300 million (5% of the need) budgeted over the long term budget for the City to use for this purpose.
• Similarly realization that based on simple arithmetic how much water we will need by 2012.
• Drought. There is conclusive evidence that the Western Cape is being adversely affected by global warming.  The effect of this can be seen clearly today.  Until thirty years ago the character of winter was that it rained for weeks at a time, cleared up for a day or two, and rained for more weeks.  The rain patterns now see us getting one, two or three days of rain followed by a week or two of warm sunshine.  This means that every time it rains, the first ten or even twenty millimetres of rain are needed just to saturate the soil before any run off occurs.  The total number of millimetres of rain may very well be the same but the way it falls makes an enormous difference.  We simply get less run off these days.

What are we able to do about it?

We can augment our own supply.  We should harvest rainwater for using during the rainy season.

The system for this is the Water Rhapsody Grand Opus, which starts with the Water Rhapsody Rain Runner to harvest water from the whole of a roof.  The harvested rainwater is delivered by an unobtrusive underground pipeline around the building, called a ring main, to water tanks (of which there are a large number of different sizes available). Each Rain Runner from each downpipe tees into the ring main.

Rainwater tanks fill very quickly, but an overflowing rainwater tank is not very romantic, so Water Rhapsody plan cleverly to balance the inflow, volume stored and the amount required in the household.

Stored rainwater is then pumped to the whole household. In practice, the stored rainwater is able to sustain the number of people in an average home / business without any municipal feed for an entire rainfall season, and of course in Cape Town, this is in the winter season.

Capetonians use on average 240 litres per person per day, but by using the WWF award winning Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation you get to use less water without changing your lifestyle. You will with these systems effectively reduce your daily water use from 240 litres to – at worst 120 litres per day. If you do this, stored rainwater will go much further, getting most householders to be completely “off the grid”. This is certainly true for the rain season, and most of the dry season too.  Getting “off the grid” is something we all aspire to, and if we can use all the systems as made and installed by Water Rhapsody, one gets as close to this magic point as is possible.

What we would have done in effect for DWEA and the Municipality without them appreciating us one bit, is to increase the stored water in the dams by a volume of water that is difficult to imagine. It is not just the stored water in one single filling that increases the volume in total, but the yield (which is the number of times the water tanks may be filled and drawn down), and then of course filled again. Should everyone through their own initiative install such a system to harvest, store, and use rainwater, this will make a total annual difference of more than 200 million kilolitres.

This is an amount that I am unable to imagine so for yours and my benefit I have created some analogies:

The volume of the total yield from all the water tanks (total number of times they are filled and drawn down) is the equivalent of more water than the total volume of the second biggest supply dam to Cape Town.  The biggest supply dam to Cape Town is Theewaterskloof near Villiersdorp which holds when full 480 million kilolitres, but not all that water is available for us to use.

Another analogy (bearing in mind the fact that the average use of water in Cape Town per household is 28 kilolitres per month), is saving a kilolitre or tonne of water per household per day.  Put this water into road water tankers and park them nose to tail, and these trucks would stretch from Cape Town to Johannesburg.  Over a whole season, these tankers would stretch around the world (at the equator nose to tail) ten times!

Yet another analogy is to imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool full of water.  The amount of water saved would fill 1350 of these pools per day.

Emergency supply. Yet another of the advantages of having rainwater tanks is that you create an emergency supply against future water outages.  Water outages are the very next way that our municipality will use to get us to use less water.  By having Water Rhapsody to install water tanks to harvest rainwater, for your benefit they will install an emergency supply fed from the municipality, which guarantees the householder of a continuous supply in spite of outages.

Water Rhapsody will provide something for all seasons.

Nineteen hundred miles away, near Xi’an in central China, power-plant worker Zhou Jie stands on the mostly dry bed of the Wei River, remembering when he used to fish there before pollution made the catch inedible.

Dagar and Zhou show the daily struggle with tainted or inadequate water in India and China, a growing shortage that the World Bank says will hamper growth in the two countries. It also is pitting water-intensive businesses such as Intel Corp.’s China unit and bottling plants of Coca-Cola Co. against growing urban use and the 1.6 billion people in China and India who rely on farming for a living.

“Water will become the next big power, not only in China but the whole world,” Li Haifeng, vice president at sewage-treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, said in a telephone interview. “Wars may start over the scarcity of water.”

About 2.4 billion people live in “water-stressed” countries such as China, according to a 2009 report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit scientific research group. Water scarcity and pollution reduce China’s gross domestic product by about 2.3 percent, the World Bank said in a 2007 report.

Water demand in the next two decades will double in India and rise 32 percent in China, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group, a research collaboration between the World Bank, management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and industrial water users such as Coca-Cola.

China’s 1.33 billion people each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available per year, compared with 1,614 cubic meters in India and as much as 9,943 cubic meters in the United States, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The 1.2 billion people in India, where farmers use 80 percent of available water, will exhaust their fresh-water supplies by 2050 at the current rate, the World Bank estimates.

For Dagar, 21, and the 200 other villagers in Jharoda Kalan, that dearth is already a daily fact of life.

“This is for our drinking and cooking,” he said, pointing to four bucketfuls he won from the fight. “I’ve been waiting for the past hour.”

Southwest China had its worst drought in a century this year, prompting Premier Wen Jiabao to say that the country would face a test to meet its grain output target. The drought affected 24 million people and 16 million acres of arable land, Liu Ning, vice-minister of water resources, said on March 31.

China, with 20 percent of the world’s population and 7 percent of its fresh water, has contaminated 70 percent of its rivers and lakes, while half the cities have polluted groundwater, according to the World Bank. By 2030 China will have a supply shortfall of 201 billion cubic meters unless the government takes steps to control demand, McKinsey partner Martin Joerss in Beijing wrote in an April report.

The Wei river was rated “severely polluted” by the government in 2009, according to a March 2 report in state-run China Daily. That’s forced Zhou to fish instead in pools near the river. The river level has dropped by about three-quarters in some places in the past decade, he said.

The pollution and shrinking rivers are partly a result of China’s rapid industrialization. Economic growth accelerated to 11.9 percent in the first quarter, the fastest pace in almost three years. It is set to reach 10.5 percent this year, according to some estimates.

“China can solve this problem in a way that creates economic value as opposed to economic cost,” said Joerss in an interview. “There is tremendous, though largely untapped, opportunity to meet China’s enormous need for water resources by focusing on better managing demand.”

“Water is a resource under great pressure in China and globally,” said Kenth Kaerhoeg, a spokesman in Hong Kong for Coca-Cola Pacific, which has water recovery systems at its 39 plants in China to reduce consumption. “Economic development, climate change and population growth will increase pressure on freshwater resources in China.”

In March, a panel from the southern Indian state of Kerala recommended suing Coca-Cola bottler Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages for $48 million damages for contamination and “serious depletion” of water in the town of Palakkad. In an April 26 e-mail, the company denied that its plant, shut since March 2004, depleted or tainted the town’s water.

In both China and India, fresh water reserves are unevenly distributed.

Northern China, with cities including Beijing, the capital, has less than a fifth of the country’s fresh water and almost half the population, the World Bank said.

Former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who began trying to address the water issue as early as the 1950s, conceived the South-North Water Diversion Project to carry water along three routes from the Yangtze River to the Yellow River. Construction began in 2003 and has cost more than $5.8 billion so far. The completion date has been pushed back four years to 2014 as costs and environmental concerns mount.

Government proposals in India were no less ambitious. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2003 appointed a panel to assess building a series of dams and canals that would link rivers to control floods and curtail shortages. The 5-trillion-rupee plan was shelved after protests from environmentalists.

Instead, India has concentrated on conservation. The government has made it mandatory for new houses and condominiums in cities to collect rainwater in water tanks in an effort to curb a decline in groundwater levels.

The Congress-led coalition is also implementing a six-year-old plan to replenish about a million lakes, ponds and water tanks. About 60 percent of India’s arable land still depends on the annual monsoon.

“Water availability has declined to such an extent that many parts of India today face a drought-like situation,” said Sushmita Sengupta, research associate at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.

The two countries’ plans don’t always mesh.

When China dammed the Mekong, the largest river flowing into Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all called for greater cooperation to prevent droughts and floods. China also plans a dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Zangbo, the highest major river in the world, which flows into India as the Brahmaputra.

The project would give Beijing control of the water supply to more than 90,000 square kilometers of land controlled by India while China claims sovereignty.

“Water scarcity is probably one of the biggest risks for investors in China and India,” said Lucy Carmody, executive director of Singapore-based investor advisory firm Responsible Research. “There is a lot of potential for border conflicts.”

Arab News -  By Bloomberg