South Africa’s Catastrophic Water Problem
2022 ж. 11 Там.
1 506 637 Рет қаралды
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Two political parties utilizing a disaster to blame each other rather than come together to end the suffering of the people they govern… What a novel concept
When I was younger I thought governments around the world would unite and create a future like Star Trek. Now I think something like Battletech or Warhammer 40k is more realistic.
Nope, never heard of it, ever
reminds me of good ol murica
Sounds horribly familiar…
Sounds like most countries governments...
I remember all those “day 0” warnings, the water saving habits we learnt in 2018 are hard to unlearn, like not flushing if its just pee. I was in a boarding school and we used massive buckets to catch shower water and flush the toilets with that water.
If it’s yellow let it mellow if it’s brown flush it down. Unless it’s dark yellow flush that shit down. I’m a penny pincher water savings kind of guy and I live in America. Use less Payless.
Was a tourist back in Feb 2018. washing ourselves on top of a bucket so we could use it to flush later was an experience. Glad that it got resolved and it didnt go worse.
I still do that shower thing too!
you can do that in an emergency, but after a while the ammonia in urine will destroy the wastewater pipes. Thats the reason why it is nonsenical to save water in europe. The more people are saving water the more water needs to be used by the wastewater treatment plant to regulary flush the pipes.
@@benjespina damn, should've came to Durban.
around 18 years ago there was a drought in europe, and our elementary school teacher told us that we had to learn how to use less water, and not let the water run while brushing teeth etc. to this day i admire him for trying to teach us kids from Bergen, Norway a town with more than 200 days of rain a year how to conserve water.
Bergen getting 75 inches a year is a moderate drought
Never understood why people would let the water run while brushing teeth. Even if it would rain non stop.
Personal usage even in excess is insignificant compared to commercial and that goes for a lot of thing beyond water. All that guilt doesn't make a real difference.
Norway is one of the country that is blessed with insane water reservoirs, on top of the rainfall received the whole land is a big fresh water tank with all these fjords and water falls. Downside is the horrible lack of sunlight and depressing weather...
That year there was a severe drought in the Crimea , because the puppet government of Ukraine , with the support of Western countries , staged a water blockade , millions of people needed water , the earth suffered because they drilled wells to get water ! The hypocritical world community did not notice the problem
I live in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Our 'day zero' is a looming threat in all our minds, only ever being delayed by some small rainfall this very warm and dry winter. We never know if next week the taps will be shut off. We've been experiencing drought for nearly the last 9 years, and little has been done. This is the ANC's South Africa.
American here. Why do you think the ANC is doing nothing about water scarcity?
@@rugiiman8917 Because it is not in their interest to govern but rather to enrich themselves and their family members. It might seem in scenarios like this that there are some sinister motives behind such inaction, but it is largely just accepted that it is incompetence. (Not saying there couldn't be such ulterior motives, just that it is not commonly assumed)
@@rugiiman8917 qa😊😊a
Australia is a dry continent too. The solution is apart from saving water and water restrictions like no watering garden. Its to build desalination plants and convert sea water to drinking water.
@@Lankyblankman least corrupt South African politician
I should emphasize, although the Western Cape Province is run by the DA, while the national government is run by the ANC, this isn't quite comparable to the US, where Texas is run by one party, while the federal government is run by another. Our provincial governments have very little power to make their own laws or pursue their own policy - their job is primarily administration.
Sounds like a nightmare if you want more autonomy locally
@@ariyune7007 Oh trust me it is
It doesn’t help when the ANC is so corrupt and deeply lined with shady money in their own pockets that they seem largely uninterested into investing or pursuing problem-solving for South Africa’s most pressing issues for years. Particularly for regions like Western Cape ruled by rival parties.
@@ariyune7007 The federal government never wants you to have more autonomy. So good luck with that.
@@ariyune7007 it really isn't a nightmare
Lived in Cape Town my whole life and it was quite the thing to live through. It got really tight in the end. Strict rationing and penalties handed out. A lot of the taps you see people filling up their large water containers is mountain/spring water and those springs are scattered around Table Mountain. They all had queues for the first time I had ever seen. There are also water tunnels under town that funnel water from Table Mountain., under town and into the ocean but not used as such for water consumption. There were lots of ideas and solutions at the time but as the rains have come back, peoples memory wanes and life threatening drought gets replaced by a COVID shut down.
Now you know To always have 5-6 2 liter bottles of water Especially since you live in the desert Never trust the government to fix things quickly
So you mean it’s like in most African countries, what happened in the past is the past and they go to sleep and reset their brain like nothing ever happened……..until the next catastrofe and again they will expect the western worlds to solve it for them.
may i ask why they were not used?
@@admiralkaede the volume of water doesn't justify the cost of the infrastructure project it would entail. Easier/cheaper to get it from the big dams (when there isn't a drought!). And at the time, it would have been difficult to harvest any large volumes of water from the tunnels. Its a pity, as its really good mountain water. But the general population was still using Table Mountain spring water as could be seen in the video. EDIT: I see from another article that the city has incorporated 15m liters of ground water from TM into its daily supply
Was there any attempt to bring in emergency desalination?
Excellent video. I moved to Cape Town at the height of the drought (great timing) and we had to have buckets in our showers to capture whatever water we could, and then use that to water the plants and flush the toilets etc. (one of many frustrating and scary remedies we had to implement)! Also, a note on pronunciation that SA'ns will appreciate: apartheid is pronounced apart-heyt. It is something of a compound word in Afrikaans and the T and H aren't meant to be read together, and D's are often pronounced as T's :p
Yes I remember during apartheid someone pointed out that for English speakers it could be pronounced "apart-hate." My only visit to SA was a few years after the official end of apartheid so I didn't see the worst of it.
I currently live in another town in South Africa. It's called Grahamstown/ Makhanda in the Eastern Cape. The water crisis has continued here, to the point where they frequently do half and half days, wherein only one-half of the town will have water one day. And the other half can have it another day. Also, the tap water is undrinkable, so you have to buy bottled water as a grocery item.
As someone who lives in Cape Town, apocalyptic is no exaggeration. It really felt as if society was about to decend into chaos in early 2018. Thankfully those winter 2018 rains came in clutch.
I followed that story and you could feel the desperation in the news reports. Every year with more normal rain buys you preparation time. These political parties you have can be replaced.
It's not if but when..... :(
@@ireallylovegod im in America but it seems like the two parties you have in charge have such a wonderful future planned out for you. 149 little water wagons where you stand in line. This is where the problem. Spend money now and move the politicians out of the way with bulldozers if you have to.
As I live in South Africa I agree
As a another South African who lived in Cape Town during the drought, I can agree that the rains in 2018 did indeed come in clutch
Look up Port Elizabeth. It’s another city, about 700km east of Cape Town. We’ve had a much much bigger water issue here for the last 11 years and neither the local nor national government have even tried to fix it. Cape Town gets all the press because it’s a popular tourist destination but other large cities are suffering worse than they are.
@@julm7744 Oh... You're serious? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA THE ABSOLUTE STATE
@@Hero101010 port english cucked by monarchy is the best name.
@@julm7744 🤣🤣🤣No one calls it that stupid name. All the government can do is rename because they can't build, so they have to rename so that it looks like an achivement!
@@julm7744 just let people call it whatever they want, as long as we bicker over names nothing important will get done
Call it what you like it won't fix the water shortage.
I lived in Somerset West, a town near Cape Town, it was really a tough to live in. The restrictions became a way of life and some people still follow some of the lesser restrictions. I remember if you went to a shop, all water bottles in the them were gone or super expensive. Though now it is way better.
Real Life Fore has one of the best documentaries programs on KZhead. So many good ones. THANK YOU. ❤️
I arrived back in Cape Town after living in Canada in December 2017. The shock of how water was wasted in Canada (I had a friend who would take like 30min showers to warm up) compared to what we had to do at home was so stark. We would shower with half presser, turning the tap on only to rinse soap off, and with a bucket to collect the run off which we used to flush the toilet once a day. The really scary part is that there are more cities, just up the East Coast, like Gqeberha (previously known as Port Elizabeth) that are going through the same thing, but because they are not as popular as Cape Town it is not as published. Yesterday I heard that the hospitals don't have enough water to wash laundry so they can't admit patients.
Tbh, besides the fact that it's a more well known and bigger town, the reason CT got more press than PE is because the CoCT was being loud with awareness campaigns, billboards, radio ads and projects all over the city. NMBM put up a few signs back in 2018/19 and seems to have forgotten about it since.
Maybe people in more wealthy nations should learn about it and learn how to save water. Wasting such a necessary resource while so many people in the world are lacking it, is not good
@@KateeAngel we have an over abundance of water in Canada. It is basically a near infinite amount in many regions. Even when we have multi year droughts we don't run out of water. Canada has 21% of the world's fresh water. Water levels are increasing in the great lakes but they do fluctuate. The vast majority of water consumption returns to the water table except for in agriculture and oil/gas sector. So it isn't really a problem to take a 30 minute shower in most of Canada. Especially since almost all of that water will get returned back to the water table.
@@Old_Ladies Can you send me a gallon of that good stuff? I'll send you a buck fifty U$D
nobody cares.
As someone from Cape Town, I remember meming about the Water Shortage during high school but in hind sight, I realize I was not exposed to the true horrors of the crisis as someone who could quite easily continue to afford clean drinking water, as opposed to those seeking water just to survive.
Heyy Gore! Wouldn't have thought to see you here! Yeah, we still buy those massive water bottles to use instead of using the tap water, just in case the drought returns. Like the drought completely reshaped how we live our daily life, even all these years later
So did I lol.
cringe name
@@crimsonavengergaming4832 Start Rain-Collecting; ignore the lingering question why a stranger comments this towards you; watch, like and share the Water-Coverage of Some-More-News and Second-Thought; realize how much better things can be by watching Not-Just-Bikes and Adam Something; learn various, various 'small things everyone can do' and ''''Life Hacks during Droughts''''; watch and spread amazing Climate-Change-Coverage like Hbomberguy, UpisnotJump, OCC, and Climate-Town; and have i mentioned Rain-Collecting?
@@liang2492 PROSZĘ, PRZESTAŃ, proszę, nie mów rzeczy, których nie rozumiesz. Szatan przyjdzie po ciebie, gdy księżyc wzejdzie! Swędzenie obszaru odbytu / osła przypisuje się infekcji pasożytniczej. Proszę, myj swoje brudne ja częściej. Obecnie dostępne są miejscowe metody leczenia pasożytów. Straszne gówno powinno wkrótce się skończyć.
I love watching your videos about places all over the world and today, finally my home town! Great video! Thanks!
As a Cape Town resident for the past 20 years, I think it is important to understand that provincial and local governments have little budget or power to initiate large infrastructure projects such as dam or water supply systems. It is all centralised through the corrupt national government, and the ANC used the water shortage as an opportunity to play politics and make the DA look bad, despite the catastrophic consequences of this decision. The DA has made Cape Town the best run Metro in the country, by miles. Unfortunately their ability to grow and improve the metros is often severely handicapped by national government decisions and policies, and of course widespread ANC corruption.
WATER-CRISIS AHEAD. Please be aware/updated thx to Second Thought and Some-More-News having covered the Water-Issues that affect the whole Planet. I will comment this multiple times, risking to be mistaken for a bot, just to reach more people.
Monterrey, the second largest city in Mexico, experienced massive water shortages because of a heavy drought in June and July of this year (2022) and it was exactly the same: the national government blamed the local government, the local government blamed the national government, and in the end no one gave a definitive solution to the crisis. I guess this kind of situation is a problem everywhere.
As a proud Regio. I can say that we are living in the hell
And from what I hear, there's still no solution to the problem, I live not too far away in Torreón and it does seem like we could be headed in that direction.
@@alanmunilla7196 Yeah, Samuel García has not done anything to get a real solution. This week we had some rainy days and I hope we will keep having that. U know? And I hope Coahuila won't be in the same situation. (Sorry for the Bad English, I'm still a newbie)
Was?
@@boeing787thebest1 Restrictions may have worked to some degree but it's no permanent solution, hopefully the situation there improves.
Great video, as a South African this was an unbelievable situation to live through. You should do another Video about the drought happening right now. In the Eastern Cape Province's biggest city the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. They have hit day 0. By the way, the people of Cape Town are called Capetonian's 🙂
I'm from PE and we haven't hit day 0 yet, but we are approaching it, our biggest supply dam is 16.6%. The metro only has 5 major Dams, 4 of which we share with the neighboring Kouga Municipality and the surrounding farm, this is a real Issue and still you find water leaks
@@andrefortuin4554 Ah! apologies thought it had hit already. if only those pesky 'coalition' politicians would stop trying to stay in power and work for the people. 😞
If only my brother, if only... I also wish the majority of people would see the seriousness of the situation and start to use water sparingly
@@andrefortuin4554 And major world powers would stop threatening each other with bombs, stop extorting countries (Like many areas in Africa, Sri Lanka, Eastern Europe), and instead help each other to protect vulnerable areas, build better water management & implement sustainable energy. Humanity is like a family where everyone is fighting about which TV channel to watch, while the house is burning down around them.
We call Capetonian's KEIPPIES [CAPE / CAPIES] . They also have the best wines in the world.
I was living in Cape Town when Day 0 was supposed to happen. I showered every other day for only up to 5 minutes, flushed the toilet with that water, UCT didn't have running sinks at the time and just had hand sanitizer. I had it good by comparison to people who live in the townships, thats for sure. It was apocalyptic to be sure
Lived through this, learned a lot of valuable lessons about preserving this precious resource. Even though I live in an area now that is likely never to run out of water, I still let the yellow mellow, and take quick 90 second showers, to name a few. I didn't realise how wasteful we were until the taps started running dry. I should mention that normally, Cape Town winters are very wet, it can rain non stop for weeks on end. No South African would in a million years have thought this would happen to Cape Town. What we experienced in 2015-2018 was extremely out of the ordinary. The city (and probably some other cities in the world) learned a valuable lesson in that you cannot always depend on the weather to be consistent.
Supposedly, Cape Town only gets around 20" or rain each year... Around here, we would call that a "drought" -- our average is around 50" per year and we've had years with over 80"... I've known a few people from South Africa... They said that it used to be a pretty safe place, back before the ANC took over...
@@seanseoltoir Weather modification
Yeah, it was quite something to live through. This is an incredible overview, captured all aspects. No one else has summarised it this thoroughly. Have enjoyed your channel for years, but to see a video about something I lived through gives me a newfound respect for the level of research and detail you put into your videos. Thank you for covering this.
Danki
It's a good channel
@@ChineduOpara WATER-CRISIS AHEAD. Please be aware/updated thx to Second Thought and Some-More-News having covered the Water-Issues that affect the whole Planet. I will comment this multiple times, risking to be mistaken for a bot, just to reach more people.
Agree 100% Dean
The SouthWestern residents of the United States need to pay close attention to this video the very same disaster is coming their way and they are still skipping merrily down the road, "as there is no problem here"
Hong Kong had this problem for a long time, up until around ~1970 every couple years people would need to queue up on the closest tap for water until they signed a water agreement with China, switched toilets from freshwater flushing to saltwater flushing and rationed water. It actually got so bad that water was only open every 4 days for 4 hours at a time as this problem was exacerbated by huge immigration and population to the city.
Flushing toilets with salt water always seemed like a good solution to coastal region to me. But the infrastructure requirements would be tricky, you'd need a lot of extra plumbing to get the salt water into and out of the residential buildings. Getting it there is one thing but retrofitting it into existing buildings might be even harder/impossible since buildings won't all be standard or easy to get into. How did Hong Kong handle that? An impactful mandatory requirement for existing buildings or letting it happen gradually over time as places go through periodic major renovations/new building projects?
Still today hongkong is much different. It were back then it has neighbors with water this is lacking in this case.
@@extrastuff9463 They build a lot of new buildings since 1970s. Millions of new flats
@@extrastuff9463 In Hong Kong, every building is required to clean, upgrade, or replace their exteriors at least once every 8 years. I'm not sure when the policy began, but the impact is that, very often, buildings simply end up getting renovated. Everything's always shiny, plus saving water saves money anyways, so why not?
interesting. thanks!
I’m always amazed by your ability to seamlessly transition to an add at the end.
It's convenient you just made this video. I'm traveling to South Africa in a couple months and I've been binging info-videos about SA. So it's great that my youtuber made one.
Cape Town took a lesson from Perth in Australia and invested in desalinisation plants. Perth has a similiar climate and has been using desalination since the 1990s to provide a very large amount of its water since it realised that it could have water problems. Cape Town was publicaly criticised in teh media for not doing ti sooner despite warnigns to do so. This is really a lesson as to what happens when a city doesnt plan in advance.
To be fair, Kuwait did this in the 50's. (Also to be even more fair the City of Cape Town has no control over budgetary planning and spending on water resources but that's just semantic.)
Question that needs to be asked is what has happen since and what’s actually still in place 😉. Have they learnt a lesson.. I’d say no. So watch this repeat itself. I think the local gov is pinning its hopes on being in charge of country instead of properly planning for the inevitable.. much like they did prior wrt being in charge of WC.. didn’t stop it. Being from Cpt means while this last drought was the most significant.. it wasnt the 1st nor will it be the last and with the massive growth of population you need more adequate supply.
To be fair, serious experts from every water-related field in every university in the country, several prominent private organisations, NGOs and even several departments of the national, provincial government and City itself had given quite extensive, explicit and detailed warnings and strong recommendations on how to avoid the very foreseeable water problems since the late 80s. A very similar group also gave very similar warnings about electricity supplies starting at about the same time. It's not that no planning was done; the plans existed wholesale and detailed in scope. No-one wanted to implement the plans and be responsible for the short term costs. Private companies have been begging to solve these problems for ages - far before they actually, inevitably became obvious to the citizens at large - and had drawn up realistic cost estimates, plans and pitches and contract negotiations could have started in 1995 already, if the government was willing.
@@blumoogle2901 yes, the government was warned and plans were there... they just didnt do it
3 Desalination plants were built, I worked on 1 of them. To my knowledge, all 3 have been disassembled.
Thank you for a very good and objective report. We Cape Tonians came together as one and we all did our bit to save water. Every time I open a tap now, I think twice and use water sparingly. I vividly recall when the first rain fell how the people whistled, screamed and shouted with joy! Finally it rained ... the drought has broken ...
*came together* 😏
Objective?
@@projektkobra2247 Stating facts instead of colouring them with shades of left/right-political bias. Both political parties were guilty of doing the exact same shit that every politician is guilty of: dealing with an impending environmental crisis only at the last minute (when it can no longer be ignored...)
@@JohnGardnerAlhadis -I know what it means. Christ. I'm questioning the veracity of the claim. South Africa isnt "better" now after the arrival of black rule. It's Haiti with gold mines.
@@projektkobra2247 Gee, no shit? Who would've thought an entire country's socio-political issues would be harder to solve than just _"put the black guy in charge, lmao."_
Love your content. Can you do a video on the load shedding issues in South Africa? There are hardly any detailed videos about it on KZhead
I was working with my dad in his landscaping company when this hit, he had to pivot his business drastically, and started installing astro turf, water efficient plants, but the main thing was grey water (recycling showers, sinks, ect.) and bore hole tanks. It was a crazy time, I remember Id dive into the ocean and dry myself off fast, not letting the salt stick to my skin, and then take a shower every 3 days with a bucket underneath that we filled up the toilet with, using hand sanitiser instead soap. The list goes on, people really banded together. If I had to compare it to anything, it felt like the pandemic, in terms of the mass fatigue and stress, but also how it brought up the best and worst of humanity
As a Capetonian I'm really impressed with your research and nuanced video. The mention of the impact of invasive plant species was great, it's often overlooked here.
i can see southern california being headed this way soon, all our reservoirs keep getting lower and lower, we've had a triple la nina (winter rain goes to oregon and washington instead of california) which may continue this winter, and that would probably kill a few ski resorts, especially with it getting hotter pretty much every summer, june and july are always not too hot but august always is, it's been upper 80s pretty much the whole month when the "average" is like 83, and these upper 80s are set to continue into next week and maybe the week after even small lakes in parks are slowly drying up, one park had two lakes and a large marsh but one of the lakes and the marsh are dry, leaving only the main lake
The difference is that most of California's water is for farming, and much of that produce is exported. So water shortages wouldn't leave people thirsty, they'd just kill cash crops that the region's environment can't sustain.
@@Br3ttM and ditch their precious avocados? Not a chance!
@@NaderNabilart you forgot the almonds lol
I wish summers here were in the 80s, we get high 90s and into the 100s from late May through to the end of August. And winters in the single digits into the negatives. Must be nice.
@@seancostello4158 Haha yeah them too
I'm watching this from Sydney Australia, realising for the first time how close we came to the same thing. We used rainwater ONLY & have always been subject to weather extremes, with years without rain, then years of flooding & with a dam opened in 1960, when the population was 2 million people, as opposed to today's 5 million, with no upgrades to infrastructure to respond to that. In the early 2000's, we had a number of years without rain. I remember on countless occasions seeing clouds forming & wondering if I should bring in the washing, before thinking "na, it's Sydney, it doesn't rain here" & just leaving it, quite comfortable in the knowledge that the clouds would just pass over & no rain would come of them. Add to that, we had massive bushfires that required massive amounts of water be used on them to stop the city burning! Kinda seems crazy now to realise how many people scoffed at the idea of wasting our taxes building a desalination plant in case it happened again. There was huge numbers of negative press stories as the plant was built & then left inactive, while still requiring maintenence funds for a full decade, before it was finally turned on when we experienced the same drought system Cape Town did. Because of that desal option, we didn't need to go into harsh restrictions & I don't think that 2017/18 situation was as bad for us as the millennial drought, even removing the desal plant from the equation, given it was only turned on for a few months at the end point of it. I'm very glad we had that option available to us though & obviously Cape Town needs to do similar now as an insurance policy!
"Cape Town is facing a huge water crisis!" *SHOWS DRONE FOOTAGE OF ENORMOUS GOLF COURSE NEXT TO A SOCCER STADIUM*
This channel has taught me SO much stuff. I don't think I would know any of this, if this channel didn't exist. More people need to watch these videos. To prepare and save the future of humanity.
I CANT Stress enough to my fellow RLL-Fans: Some More News and Second-Thought are the 2 KZheadrs with BEST Water-Shortage-Coverage!
English: how many times do you want to use the word "exacerbate" RLL: Yes
I live in Cape Town. Flushing the toilet or showering were a luxury no matter your finances in 2018. It was very scary. We actually already had waterpoints set up at natural springs.
I like this dudes dramatic reading style. Every sentence is more important than the last.
My dads family were part of the group exiled from district 6 . Nice to hear an International channel speak about it
Yet they never once mentioned _"Cape Malays"_ and _"Cape Coloureds"_ when talking about Cape Town. That's sad bru.
@@johndoeiii9767 probably because he didn’t look into Cape Town’s exact demographics in that much detail when researching the water crisis
@@johndoeiii9767 true. But I guess he wasn’t focusing so much on the exact demographics of people living there
@@johndoeiii9767 The word "coloured" is derogatory in the USA, so they probably side-stepped it...
@@alexrossouw7702 But "people of colour" is fine, makes no sense.
So happy that you spoke about South Africa!🇿🇦
This was a VERY GOOD and INFORMATIVE video, and also provoked GREAT THOUGHT into more of what I do EVERY DAY! To keep up to date with what is going on worldwide, not just in ones own country! A VALUABLE LESSON FOR ALL!
Good video, I think South Africa's current electricity crisis can also make a good topic. There's a long history of different flavours of mismanagement there.
I'm so glad you talked about one of my country's capital cities and the problems it had to face
We have faced it together my brother, and we will continue to bear down on the white people who made this our reality. Soon, it will be our time, I promise.
For those who are confused about the water sources being replenished by September, South Africa is in the southern Hemisphere so they get winter between May and September.
Except that the Cape Province has a Mediterranean climate meaning that their rains fall with this May to September winter season.
Only the South-Western parts of the country have a Mediterranean climate. Rain is in the winter months from May to September. The North-Eastern regions don't generally get rain in this period, mainly during our summer.
I'm from Cape Town and survived day zero! 😅 Great video about the situation, thank you!
While I'm not a citizen of cape town (I'm from a town about 1 and a half hours drive away) I still remember being told in school "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it"
8:39 as a dutchman, I can fully understand why you didn’t try to pronounce “Theewaterskloofdam” 😂
😂😂😂😂😭
Tí-uater-sklóf-dem
I CANT Stress enough to my fellow RLL-Fans: Some More News and Second-Thought are the 2 KZheadrs with BEST Water-Shortage-Coverage!
As an Afrikaans speaking person, I was disappointed not to get to hear new and interesting ways to butcher the local names.
@@blumoogle2901 "Local names"
So amazing this long streak of weekly videos.Very grateful, indeed
Something similar to this is happening once again but in the Eastern Cape instead of the Western Cape, during the past winter season there was little to no rainfall now we are heading into summer with many holidaymakers coming from the capitals and we have barely enough water for the people who live here :/ and we have already hit day 0.
Pe is such a cool city 😭
I remember my company happened to sell water in 5l bottles, and we limited it to 8 bottles per customer per day, and at one point we had two delivery trucks, per day, only delivering pallets of water while all other stock came in 1 truck. At one point we scheduled a dedicated staff member every day simply to unpack the water trucks onto bases and wheel them out to the sales floor and repeat, all day. The supplier couldn't keep up with demand, not even close, so people would drive from store to store and phone all day trying to stockpile water. All the stores in the province also installed water tanks in the receiving yards that were fed through from the mains supply before going into the store and set up to be able to accept water from a tanker truck. There was even policies drawn up that would have enabled staff to take a certain amount of water each day from the store supply, for free. The tanks still exist, but only recently they are starting to be mothballed in place as when they are connected and in use they have to be tested twice a week and the water cycled for use to remain safe. One thing which the governments bad infrastructure maintenance and lack of upgrades over the last few decades combined with the 19 has ensured, is that basically every large business and retailer has explicitly set out to invest in private infrastructure which allows days or weeks of effectively normal trading despite infrastructure issues forcing them to go off grid - electricity, water, Internet/telephone/networking and transport of stock, staff and supplies, including protests and threats like cyber or other threats and have practiced, effective hair-trigger-response emergency policies and procedures to cope with emergencies with minimal disruption.
As a resident of Lima, we had our water shortage problem too back in 2017, albeit it wasn't that bad when compared to Cape Town's drought. Long story short every 5 to 7 years el niño comes in and flash floods occur naturally, and this niño in particular polluted the reservoir so badly that we had no water for an entire week. But the real reason why i put this forward is because that flood could've been worse, because up in the Andes next to the 22 central highway and the Rimac river(the primary water source for the entire city) there's mineral waste of a mining operation done by a belgian company which left the country almost a decade ago, which is only protected by canvas and is sitting next to the primary water source. Had this flood became worse or and 8.0 earthquake hit that place, then all that mineral waste would've polluted the river and would've closed the Atarjea reservoir indefinitely, in the 2nd largest city located in a desert, only behind El Cairo. Edit: there are also underground aquifers and water desalinization plants but only cover a tiny fraction of the city's demand.
Average balgian corporation moment
Why the heck has no one cleaned up that mineral waste? Sounds like they did not even attempt to make a tailings pond. 😳
@@Erakius323cause that's easy mineral water strait in the drinking supply, next all you need is an underground reservoir of CO2 and you got sparkling water on tap 💯
@@Erakius323 The same i asked and the answer lied in a judicial drama that was last followed in 2019 and then no one knows what happened afterwards. Oh and by the way there's yet another mining project that's gonna take place, you guessed it, next to a body of water, this time in the upstream lagoons that feed the river. It hasn't materialized yet and hopefully it never will.
Lol and then the other side of the El Nino is what caused the drought in South Africa. Weather science is fucked.
A relevant reason to properly pronounce apartheid without the "th" sound, like either ah-pahr-teid (Afrikaans) or uh-par-tide (English) is because of its meaning. It literally means apart-hood, in other words apartness or the state of being apart. A-par-thyde doesn't mean anything.
I came here to bring up the inaccurate pronunciation...
@@Roach131313 Bru 😂
I was here during the water shortage of 2017. Instantly got a water-borne illness staying at a Hostel in Capetown where we stood in buckets to recycle the water during a shower.
"A very limited source of water" Shows water being dumped onto the ground.
Living in Cape Town it felt like one disaster after another, first the Water crisis, then all the fires on the mountains, then the Covid Pandemic and we still have a country wide energy crisis. Just one correction on what you mentioned of District 6, it was never a mainly black town, although there were some black and white people that lived there, however it was Coloured/Malay town, as those are group of people that makes up the majority of Cape Towns population.
Remember coloured people are in part black people
I guess all of those coloured people would count as black people over in the US.
As with every other "problem" in South Africa (for the past couple of decades), all that is needed is to follow the proverbial money. You will find it always leads back to the same common denominator... leaving you with no doubt about who is to blame.
Please elaborate
Details would help those not familiar, as an American I can say I want to apologize for draconian pressures put on the "white" segment of society to integrate the many hostile dysfunctions you were embedded within. SA had problems, and needed some reforms, but foreign do gooders are often arrogantly naive.
@@Noctem_pasa The ANC ruling party is a cesspool of corruption at every level of government and government entities, like the local broadcaster, the local airline, railway, the local electricity producer etc etc etc. As a result, basic services, infrastructure, joblessness, crime etc all across the country have been getting worse and worse, to the point where things will get way worse before they get better.
That darn ANC. How could they not pay mother nature her water bills🤦🏾♂️
@@tshepishochuene1280 They refused to pay for infrastructure that could have prevented the problem. Too busy looting.
Went cape town (the most amazing city ive seen bar Tokyo) in 2017. The air bnb had really strict rules like use a bucket to catch the cold shower water as it gets up to temp. Then use bucket to flush toilet. Frankly it was a minor inconvenience and glad to do my part. But throughout the city they frankly took it in their stride. Here in the uk we are told we have a drought and so typical fear. Ppl filling poots and water tanks before it's not allowed exacerbating the situation
My home town in South Africa is also facing this now. The only thing delaying it is the winter rains we’ve been having
narrator just learnt the word "exacerbate" lol
It's blows my mind how frequently you are able to post such high quality videos. Plus everything on Nebula!
They have entire full teams for content and video-making
@@puppyfisher1998 Very true. And it's clear that they work well together to bring us these amazing videos so often :)
Can put sponsored ads in monetized videos with new videos 🤪
Living next to two of the Great Lakes here in the US, this, thankfully, never seemed to issue where I live. Always thought about moving to Florida or Arizona but I think I'll stick around here in northeastern Wisconsin...
As a Capetonian, I remember showering over a bucket and using that water to flush toilets, we would use leftover water for anything that didn't require clean water. It even went so far as at school being encouraged to arrive in sports kit so you wouldn't need to wash extra clothes, in early 2018, school sports matches were almost all cancelled as preparation of fields and pools was almost impossible. Announcements in school assemblies and signs in almost any publuc bathroom, not just in school, with the slogan "if it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown flush it down." Cause you weren't supposed to flush if you just needed a pee. When showering, we would turn off the tap while washing ourselves and only have the water on to rinse. In gyms, there was a loud timer counting down 2 minutes in repeat so you could keep to a 2 minute shower, and baths were not allowed (obviously there was no way of policing this but everyone did their bit). The collective strength our population showed was incredible and we all did our part to keep day 0 as far as possible. The attitude we all had towards the regulations and restrictions was one of trust and belief. Not like what we saw across the world (SA included) towards Covid and that is why we got through it. A couple times day 0 was pushed back a bit not because of rains but because we were using less water. We all knew the day and it was mainstream news when it changed, which happened any time there was any rain.
That was insightful, good job. Kindly cover our disgraceful electricity problems also 👍
This is a very interesting video, If you get the chance you should look into covering the drying up of Lake mead in Nevada/Arizona and how it’s severely impacting society and agriculture in the southwestern U.S
in reality, that's a total nothingburger compared to other countries. You're still watering lawns with water from those dams ffs! Completely self induced & you deserve everything you get if you can't figure out the need to use water sensibly as your dam levels continue to drop at alarming levels for years & years!
same people who water their huge front laws and back gardens
It is shocking to find out how many people don't belive we can't run out of water. I saw a KZhead post on it and it was mostly year 3's that didn't know better but a surprising amount seemed like they were fully grown adults who were denying this stuff could exist because " water never runs out ".
Everything is so catastrophic, over emphasied and hyped up on this channel to level 10.
cape town running out of water was a massive fucking deal and all over the news for months rtrd.
@@espressonoob
something similar is happening in Monterrey, Mexico, actually its happening all over the north of mexico with different reasons like soda companies and droughts, dont know if thats a video topic youd like to cover but seems interesting
could you elaborate? what's happening, what's going on with the soda companies etc?
@@KoxiarzZMC the water is being cut around 3:00 PM beacuse the local dams water levels are dangerously low. That being said a lot of people are blaming this entirely on climate change when the reality is that the state's governor kicked out all the people responsible for water maintenance/supply with friends/yes men of his and they don't know jack shit on dam maintenance and the state is suffering for his incompetence partly. We northern Mexicans have had hot summers way before I was born, last two summers particularly were hotter than this one and rains were rare but people conveniently forget that and just coincidentally after the new governor was elected and he sacked all the state's old employees the water issue began to surface/deteriorate. So while there is a an increased lack of water in northern mexico because of general drought, in my city most educated people agree the fault lies on the millennial idiot from San Pedro (rich district) who somehow got elected, since the high temperatures and absent rains in June/July have been a thing since forever. That doesn't mean climate change didn't made things worse tho. Living in extremes for years makes you desensitized to this shit.
@@strikeone7803 thats for Monterrey, theres other areas in northern mexico affected Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Danone, Nestlé, Bimbo, Aga y otras empresas de productos chatarra extraen anualmente 133 mil millones de litros de agua para producir comida y bebida que no sólo afectan la salud de los consumidores sino que además provocan serios daños ambientales en México. which translates to : Coke, Pepsi, Danone, Nestle, Bimbo, Aga (local soda company) and other junk food companies exctract 133 Billion Liters of water (around 36 billion gallons) annually to produce food and beverages (? that not only affect the consumer s health but also do serious environmental damage in Mexico take this knowing that most of this companies work near the us, you know, to make it easy to export, working in a somewhat arid area and people is suffering with water shortages constantly
@@KoxiarzZMC The soda companies and breweries in that area have been taking up or have drained most of their water source for production thanks to what I may understand is the govts fault for both the State and City (Talking about Monterrey Metropolitan Area in the state of Nuevo León, MX) thats what I’m hearing about for that situation as well as these long hot dry summers that have swept Northern and pretty much a good chunk of Central Mexico
@@KoxiarzZMC adding up to previous answers, it's something similar of what happened in Texas with the the power shortage. Politicians and Industrial leaders assumed that favorable climate conditions would stay like and ignored warnings, stepped back from preventive measures and bet on economic growth placing general wellbeing on the table; believing they would surely win that bet. Experts on scientific communication here in Mexico are actually trying to promote the use of the term "desertification" over "drought" because the warnings have been ignored since the mid 2010s and they believe "drought" has made people assume it's a temporary event, or that the presence of rain (even if it's less every year) means it's over.
To be honest I live in Switzerland and we have a drought too right now. Fields with dried out crops on them. I haven't mowed the lawn in over a month, would probably have more dust that grass in the bin afterwards. I work at the Badi (think municipal bath/waterpark we even have a new waterslide) and it's becoming kind of tight as to whether we can water the lawn there, in addition to that the pool takes about 2.3 Million liters of water and we have to clean aswell. Rather praradox, the hotter it is the more visitors we have, the more water we expend in cleaning and circulating fresh water into the pools, though water is being filtered and recurculated constantly.
It's almost like global warming is affecting all the climates in the world. 😜
Sounds very similar to Cape Town, I see the whole of Europe is under a heat wave.
In the UK we are having fires in cities and all the crops are dead
Britain's facing drought, our reservoirs are running dry, we haven't had rain in months. I want the stereotype to come back again
@@moritamikamikara3879 I've been seeing the pics, crazy. You will be green soon, the rain will come.
There's something about the term "day zero" that just sounds ominous. Thank God it didn't come to pass. Thank you for another excellent video! Stay well out there everybody, and God bless you, friends. ✝️ :)
I remember living rough that when i was eleven. Not aloud to bath, 2 min showers under a bucket, not aloud to flush the toilet, taps only working in the morning before they were cut for the rest of the day and more.
We really should put so much more resources into desalination science. Making desalination process fast, cheap and reliable would pretty much solve water issues for most parts of the globe.
They've been trying that for decades , very tough nut to crack .
The only problem is it’s really energy intensive. While we can certainly improve efficiency, it’s inherently going to require a lot of energy. We would need to make sure it did not further contribute to climate change
And then you destroy the marine environment around the plants unfortunately. Brine water is toxic
@@johnkeefer8760 It produces a lot of very salty brine too which is bad for the local environment :(
No. ffs can people online stop saying this BS. Desalination causes a dead zone in the water surrounding is. desalination plants are of course on the coast. and guess what. 90% of fish commonly consumed by humans live or have breeding ground near the coast. You would cause one of the largest drops in ocean life since human existence by mass desalination. We need better recycling and to keep aquifers filled.
nobody: Real Life Lore: “the Ent-HIRE GDP”
You're literally in my top 3 channels of all time, with Veratasium and Smarter Every Day. Honorable mention, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Great work 🥳 Thank youuuuu 💜
Start Rain-Collecting; ignore the lingering question why a stranger comments this towards you; watch, like and share the Water-Coverage of Some-More-News and Second-Thought; realize how much better things can be by watching Not-Just-Bikes and Adam Something; learn various, various 'small things everyone can do' and ''''Life Hacks during Droughts''''; watch and spread amazing Climate-Change-Coverage like Hbomberguy, UpisnotJump, OCC, and Climate-Town; and have i mentioned Rain-Collecting?
You’ve been doing a lot of extremely interesting topics lately. Not to throw shade on your older stuff, but I’m finding the recent stuff excellent.
Las Vegas has some of the best water reclamation infrastructure in the world, recycling almost 99% of indoor water for reuse elsewhere. As Cape Town has no choice but to update it's haphazard and aged infrastructure, it could take some broad design notes from Vegas tech. Along with desalination (preferably nuclear), Cape Town could very well be poised to be a world leader and icon in municipal water management in the 21st century if they handle funding and planning carefully.
these sorts of things are spurred by necessity until push comes to shuff people generally dont think too much about it and just enjoy whatever costs the least and provides grestest convinience.
Just don't build pointless cities in the desert would be a nice start.
in this broken corrupted country that RPA has become?;p good joke:p maybe if China will sponsor it..
@@ireallylovegod In fairness, it wasn't pointless when it was built. It's just not essential NOW. But it didn't just stop existing because someone dug a canal. :)
@@maxsalmon4980 After the railworkers finished with it then it was just a cash cow for the mob, i call that pointless.
i just visited south africa for the first time a month ago, interesting to hear about this!
As a Cape Town resident through this period, this whole debacle infuriated me. For all our technological advancements, water, the simplest and most essential resource cannot be properly managed. It should never become political. What it highlighted to me is that with our booming populations and more extreme weather patterns, we can no longer rely on a linear, extraction-based resource management model - a circular approach is essential. There are many tried and true technologies that can achieve this. And this goes beyond water, all resources should move to a circular model as much as possible. It really is the only way to continue our level of expansion and technological advancement. Even in the face of such low probabilities of this occurring, we are surely beyond relying so much on apathetic nature.
I live in the Eastern Cape province, and unfortunately with different government parties running the provinces than the national government it makes the bureaucracy to get anything done that much harder, as well as misuse of money the amount of corruption in our government our infrastructure will seemingly never get better. For example, here in the Eastern Cape water is still in very short supply, the dams that supply Gqeberha (Formally Port Elizabeth) are often below 20% capacity, we have days where our water is shut off for 4+ hours to preserve water. And years ago, instead of building a desalination plant, which was proposed due to the drought and forseen future shortages, the government felt that spending 100 Million+ South African Rand (ZAR) to change the Port Elizabeth's name to the aforementioned Gqeberha (keh - bear - ggg - ah)
I live in Port Elizabeth, about 740km east in the Eastern Cape province, this town is also one of the major cities in the province and we are facing a similar crisis, our biggest supply Dam is at 16.6% of Capacity.
I don't know if I'd ever feel okay watering my garden or even washing my car ever again. After living through that, and how close it came to disaster, it just doesn't feel as important, you know?
My great grandfather owned land in Cape Town that was expropriated by the NP government to make way for Ocean View, which was rezoned as an area for Coloureds (Afro-Austronesian-Asian-European people). It's not a dynamic often spoken about, but it did happen.
I remember when the news in Sydney was constantly saying that a city the size of Sydney was running out of water. At the time I didn't know it was cape town until I got into geography myself but. Can't imagine how it was like
If there's no capes in cape town, I'm not going.
I grew up in Cape Town, this water crisis has existed for at least 25 years. I remember water restrictions and conservation efforts from when I was a young teen. Day 0 was just it coming to a head, the drought was just a precipitating event, not the cause of the crisis.
The Earth always has the same amount of water. Water is not used up, it merely moves from place to place. The idea that the amount of water available to humans will go down is simply not true, unless we get hit by a massive ice age, and even then we could simply make large scale melting plants and it would no longer be a problem. Desalination and Reverse Osmosis are two options for a place like South Africa, and with Desalination the recovered Sea Salt could be sold to offset some of the operating costs.
I live in South Africa, this drought was pretty bad
You can have a look at Gqeberha, previously Port Elizabeth, another city in South Africa, that currently has almost no water with experts predicting little to no rain for the next six years!
As a South African who lives in Cape Town, this is sadly very true. There are huge water problems, but things are getting better.
There is a city/metro area about 500 miles east of Cape Town called, Port Elizabeth or Nelson Mandela Metro which has had drought conditions for 8 years. Our dams are at ~15% capacity and we are being limited to 50L a day per person. It is however, largely a political issue - rival parties fighting over control of the metro instead of planning ahead and making sure corruption is not impacting our future water supply.
would love to see a video on load shedding too since that still happens now across the country (its when our electricity gets turned off for 2 hours multiple times a day)
Not really unique majority of developing countries have it far worse than South Africa
@@danpom1426 South Africa should not be in the condition of the majority of developing countries. Even after basically a civil war, and lots of sanctions, this version of it started out being "1/4 of an Australia". Now it's "1/5 of an Australia", and that's the projected future trajectory. Look up "Zondo Commission Findings" if you want to know how the country went down when it should've gone up. (I mean relatively. Of course the economy overall has improved, floating on the boom that floated all boats. No help from a government with officials who steal everything, though.) If you knew anything more than what you think ought to be the case "for a developing country", about South Africa, you wouldn't be calling the disintegration of the electricity supply system normal (it's not total, but the country had a good economic platform to build off, so this should simply not be a problem.) If you want to discover how harmful a president can be to a country, "Jacob Zuma" should put you on the trail, too. Don't take my word for it, ask google. Google knows everything, and might even share something relevant with you.
@@sicko_the_ew I was looking at how much Jacob Zuma’s administration cost South Africa, and it was like R470 billion rand or 33 billion dollars, that would be the equivalent of if Biden or Trump cost the US 2 trillion dollars, if you compare GDPs
It never ceases to amaze me how SA has been in a downward spiral for many, many years and yet the politicians running this country are multi millionaires with a billionaire or two thrown in. Yes, the rand is extremely weak but considering people still don’t have access to basic sanitation, you have to wonder.
This has turned into the ManBearPig channel. Klaus Schwab approves this message.
How did a video about water almost running out teach me more about the apartheid than any schooling ever did?
Yeah, Puerto Rico, my home and lovely island where if it stops raining for two weeks, we get into water rationing. Every summer since 2017 has been the same🙄.
I thought you would mention the research in desalinification. The area has so much sun that even just saline-basins evaporating into dew-gathering devices could be a bit of help; but in emergency, today there exist ways to get more water by desalification processes. Reverse Osmosis: The leading process for desalination in terms of installed capacity and yearly growth is reverse osmosis (RO). The RO membrane processes use semipermeable membranes and applied pressure (on the membrane feed side) to preferentially induce water permeation through the membrane while rejecting salts. Reverse osmosis plant membrane systems typically use less energy than thermal desalination processes ... The Ras Al-Khair Power and Desalination Plant is a power and desalination plant located in Ras Al-Khair on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. -- The plant includes five high-efficiency gas turbines operated in combined cycle mode and in single mode.[5] It uses a hybrid system of eight multi-stage flashing units and 17 reverse osmosis units.[11] Freshwater output from the plant is pumped via pipelines to Riyadh and Hafr Al-Batin. Pronunciation: Apart-heit (maybe inadvertently you say apar - theid).
Apartheid is the word given to it by the political opposition, it was called Seperate Development
@@wolraadwoltemade3275 Yes that is why I added a hyphen: Apart == they are not together, they are separate, the ethnic groups. (And the speak says "Apar - theid" which is totally illogical and wrong).
Wasnt this problem predicted by a whole bunch of people in 2015 when the city council started firing a lot of the engineers whos job was keeping the water supply running, and then filling up those jobs with people who were not qualified for this at all but were politically more favored. I really dont wanna be that guy, but when your city disaster that you claimed was only because of lack of rain, was already predicted years in advance then I have my doubts if this is not simply a scapegoat... Edit: Just so you guys know what I am talking about. I was listening to a whole bunch of podcasts in 2015 and on one of those the guest was some guy from cape town who was telling this story of how this local goverment was firing all those people with the know how of how to run the citys water supply. I still remeber feeling pretty baffeled that you would hear nothing from any traditional media site anywhere in the west about this. Basicially at the end of the podcast the guy was literally crying while talking about how the current goverment is destroying the city and they dont want to listen. He very explicitly explained that in the coming years the city will completly run out of water if they dont do anything about it.
I remeber that! They replaced the white engeeners wirh Black ones....
Also every year white farmers are murdered because of "unequal farmland distribution"
I've heard similar stories about Eskom... Also, I don't think they're lying that the drought caused the shortage, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been able to weather it if only they prepared. You know the saying, you must save up for a not-so-rainy day
Yes. This is exactly what happened. I work with a woman who is related to one of those people fired. The firing and hiring was done purely on the basis of skin colour - I think related to BBBEE policies. Anyone who dared suggest that the new hirees weren't capable of doing the job was queried with "So you don't think black people can do the job of a white person ?" This completely ignored the fact that the average incumbent had 15 years of experience. The consequences of the drought were 100% foreseeable, and could have been mitigated by better management. At least some of the mitigation which didn't take place related to intra-city disagreements. So the water existed, but was not being distributed in the best way - the correct palms weren't being greased etc. I'm not surprised that I never read about this in the media, but it should serve as a warning to the US states who introduce equity acts. Trying to do this kind of thing overnight leads to suffering.
@@tonycatman So dumb firing them. As a black man I believe experience should matter the most not the colour of your skin with these types of important jobs and firing/hiring someone based of their race seems pretty racist.
was a very interesting time. i live in KZN, which is a lot wetter than Western cape. Was very strange being completely comfortable with water whilst the one of the most popular cities in the country was completely dry. Interestingly enough, this year and KZN had one of its worst floods to date. Very interesting.
I lived in CT for a month or two in 2018 at the height of the water restrictions. I adjusted to short showers, only flushing when you have to etc no problem. Made me realise how wasteful we are of water elsewhere.
In addition to expanding its storage capacity, Cape Town should also invest in desalination given its proximity to the ocean.
It did during the drought and can easily reassemble them when necessary.
I blame the ANC. You can't force people to build a reservoir without pay.
@Fitz the dragon the african national party(a political party).
But the Western Cape and Cape Town has always been run by the DA
@@BOT-MERC African national congress
@@cwengagilimane2281 don't they get their funds from ANC regardless.
Yup
Please consider covering our national practice of loadshedding as well. It's like this video, but replace water with electricity 😂 It can be like a crossover episode as well, since Cape Town's dams allow our local municipality to keep our periods of scheduled rolling blackouts less frequent than what the rest of the country goes through.
It was a hardcore time here in Cape Town. I remember in 2018 we got like two years of rain in one season. I remember reading of a lot of flooding and landslides because it rained so heavily.