A Million Cape Town Households Face Water Rationing. How Did a Modern City Get Here?

After a drought called "the worst in 384 years," people like Sanya have begun to ask what went wrong

Cape Town is South Africa's second-largest city. After three straight years of drought, the government announced that "Day Zero" will arrive on May 11. On that day, the taps of more than a million households across the city will be shut off, and residents will have to queue at 200 newly built water collection points, with supply rationed to 25 liters per person per day.

"We're used to turning on the tap and having water come out. It feels like the most natural thing in the world. But over the past few years, people in Cape Town have slowly been learning to live with an increasingly dry daily life." Tom Sanya, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town's School of Architecture, told QDaily that he has started counting his family's daily water use — shorter showers, fewer flushes. He can't remember the last time he washed his car.

Official and unofficial websites across Cape Town now carry tables of daily water use: a five-minute shower takes 45 liters, five flushes of the toilet about 25 liters, 15 minutes of watering your garden 150 liters. Most hotels have pulled the plugs out of every bathtub, and some roadside car washes have been banned outright.

Cape Town is a famous tourist destination in South Africa, a city long thought to manage its ecology and environment well in one of the driest corners of the world. But after this drought, called "the worst in 384 years," people like Sanya have begun to ask what went wrong.

Bottled water, water tanks, drilling rigs: what people are scrambling for before "Day Zero"

The University of Cape Town, where Sanya works, is on holiday, so there are few students on campus, though the cafeteria is still open. At first his colleagues were still arguing over whether flushing public toilets less often was "civilized." The automatic flush fittings on the men's urinals had already been taken out. "These days that isn't even a question anymore."

Last August, Sanya bought equipment and sank a well in his backyard. He lives in Muizenberg, near Cape Town's coast. "I was lucky. I bought the gear last year." Drilling equipment is now a hot commodity, and most hardware stores have cleared out their stock. According to The Guardian, anyone who wants a rig today will wait at least a year, and pay dearly for it.

The panic keeps spreading. Bottled water, water tanks, storage cisterns and pool covers have all been snapped up. The price of bottled water has climbed, stock is running down fast, and many supermarkets have begun limiting how much each customer can buy.

Because of apartheid and the income divides that followed it, people of entirely different classes in this city live in entirely different kinds of space. On one side are upmarket seaside homes with swimming pools, lawns on automatic sprinklers, and private gardens. On the other are vast informal settlements, more often called "slums." Cape Town's population is about 4 million, and 1 million of them live in these settlements, where households have no tap of their own. Inside the community, there is roughly one public tap every 200 meters.

"In fact, people in these informal settlements have been living in a perpetual state of Day Zero for a long time." Sanya says they have been "forced" to get used to a life without water.

Kirsty Carden, a colleague of Sanya's, is a researcher at the University of Cape Town's Future Water Institute. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she pointed out that when people talk about wasted water, the picture they reach for most often is a broken, dripping tap against a backdrop of derelict housing — as if bad housing were what damages the environment.

But that is a form of stigma. In Cape Town a quarter of the population lives in slums, and they use just 4.5% of the water. "The people with private gardens and swimming pools use far more, but they use it in a more 'respectable' and more convenient way. You turn on the tap, and everyone feels fine about it: 'I paid for it.'"

The buildings and urban spaces considered civilized, upmarket and professionally designed mostly ignore how much water they consume. "For many Cape Town households, 50% of daily water goes on watering the lawn and 20% on flushing toilets. Many commercial towers put 60% of their water into air-conditioning systems, and all of it is drinking water. Hardly anyone has studied whether it could be replaced by greywater — household wastewater, or water not absorbed in a production process — or by something else." Sanya remembers repeating these figures to his students as far back as 2012. "But nobody imagined that when the disaster came, it would come this close to us."

"All of this could have been changed through green building design." In South Africa, plenty of architects and developers have already sought Green Building Council certification, some through "passive design" that cuts a building's energy use, others by recycling greywater. "But even today, people still think of it as nothing more than political correctness."

Can a natural disaster be predicted? What could the government have done in advance?

Tom Sanya was born in Uganda, in East Africa. "I went through worse as a child, so this doesn't frighten me." Until he was 17, Sanya rode his bicycle every day to a spot 15 kilometers away to fetch water, filled a bucket with 40 liters and rode home. In Ugandan villages, nearly every household lives on a meager supply of water.

"But Cape Town is different. This is a modern city, and that means people expect things of it. A city owes a duty to the people who live in it."

The reckoning over this disaster is still under way. Where the city gets its water, how supply is shared out, and why alternative sources were not developed sooner have all become points of argument.

One major cause, many believe, is over-reliance on a single source. For a long time Cape Town's water supply has depended on the weather: ration it in dry years, and let the reservoirs slowly refill when the rain is generous. Six large reservoirs, begun in the 1970s, are the city's most important source of water, and almost nothing else has been built at scale. "Leaning heavily on a handful of reservoirs, collecting rain in them to feed a whole city — a water system like that has no defense at all against the kind of extreme weather we have now. There is no resilience in it."

Since 1995, Cape Town's population has grown by 79%, while its water storage has grown by 15%.

Rain in Cape Town normally falls between June and August. The severe drought that began in 2015 has left rainfall far short. Green spaces have withered and most swimming pools have run dry. As of February 12 local time, the six big reservoirs were 24.9% full. Officials have warned that once that figure falls below 13.5%, normal supply to the city will be cut off — which is why "Day Zero" has had to be imposed. Theewaterskloof, the city's largest reservoir, currently holds 12%.

The date of "Day Zero" has been moved several times. It was first expected in early April, and has now been pushed back a month to May 11. The delay was not the doing of the rain that fell on February 10 local time. That rain arrived at a welcome moment — people brought out pots and pans to catch it, and some stood outside to feel water on their skin after so long without it — but it brought only 2 to 10 millimeters, nowhere near enough to break the drought.

The delay came mainly because some farmers voluntarily cut their agricultural water use, though Sanya points out that it also means lower output of food, wine and other products.

Some farm owners at the nearby Groenlands farm are willing to supply water to the city; they have already built a fairly sustainable water-recycling system. Cape Town residents have also kept cutting agricultural water use, and some have found other sources, such as sinking wells.

But scholars are starting to worry that the water crisis will do wider economic damage. Agriculture was hit first. People have criticized the government for approving several new vineyards in 2017, in the middle of the drought. And as agriculture suffers, jobs disappear one by one — and much of that workforce lives in the informal settlements.

"We attack some farm owners for thinking only about business, and praise others for building agricultural water systems on their own, but very few people notice that the farmworkers on those farms will lose their jobs. The effect is systemic."

"I don't enjoy talking about politics, but there really is a complicated political relationship behind this"

Sanya's colleague Gina Ziervogel, an associate professor in the University of Cape Town's Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, puts it more bluntly: this disaster is man-made.

South Africa's national government is run by the African National Congress (ANC), while the Western Cape, the province Cape Town sits in, is governed by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). The Economist has noted that the DA accuses the ANC of refusing to fund water projects.

Agricultural water quotas have long been controlled by the national government, and the province has no power to intervene. The national government also holds the resources for building water infrastructure, and it oversees urban supply, other municipal matters, and the Western Cape's farming sector, including the large wine estates east of Cape Town.

In the first two years of the drought, experts criticized the national government for failing to cut supply to agriculture, which made today's situation worse. It even approved the building of several new vineyards. How to balance a city's water against the water farming needs to grow remains unresolved.

In 2015, agriculture held a 40% quota of the Western Cape's water and cities 60%. The severe drought was already eating into reserves. But the national Department of Water and Sanitation took no steps to reduce the agricultural share.

Rainfall in the 2015 wet season was low, and the provincial government applied to the national government for money to drill wells and build water-recycling systems. The request was refused. The next year, the national government recognized 5 of the 30 drought zones the Western Cape had declared, but the city of Cape Town was not among them. As of October 2017, no disaster relief money had been paid out.

David Olivier, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, wrote in December 2017 that the real question is whether the Western Cape government handled this crisis effectively, and that what the crisis exposes, at its core, is politics rather than rainfall.

Tom Sanya says he doesn't like talking about politics, but this crisis is political. For many years the province has asked the central government for money to build infrastructure and been turned down. Over the past 15 years Cape Town's population has kept growing, and the city has still managed to guarantee its water. That was not easy. Before Berg River, now the city's third-largest reservoir, could be built, the Western Cape spent a long time lobbying the national government; approval came only in 2002, and the dam was finished in 2009. "Without it, it's hard to imagine how we would face this crisis today."

The New York Times interviewed staff at South Africa's water department, who said the department had warned as early as 2007 that the city needed to look again at groundwater or other new sources. Cape Town's own local government has made mistakes too. Last year it took the long way round: instead of pumping groundwater, it spent time and effort building a seawater desalination system, with little to show for it.

Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape, has tried to pin the blame on a severe drought she says could not have been predicted. The South African Weather Service replied that blaming the weather, the climate or the forecasting system is a way of dodging responsibility and excusing political inaction: research in several disciplines has pointed for years to the water crisis facing South Africa, the Western Cape and Cape Town.

Sanya and his colleagues are now working on water-sensitive urban design at the Future Water Institute, a field that crosses architecture, urban planning and environmental design. They study rainwater collection, sustainable drainage, integrated water resource management, the relationship between reserves and demand, and the questions of social equity that lie behind water.

Climate change will bring more frequent rain and more frequent drought. In Cape Town, drought will become the "new normal." "I hope this water crisis wakes everyone up out of the settled life we used to lead, and gets us to start working on how to transform this city and make it more resilient."

Cover image: independent.co.uk, theguardian