Cape Town Is 90 Days Away from Running Out of Water

Anyone know of any good longer form articles exploring the topic?

- If the city water system is largely shut down, like the article says, there will have to be a system of collecting water rations from distribution points.

- It's provoked a lot of class antagonism -- one response has been, "Finally, the well off population will have to carry water home in buckets, the same way as the poor 'township' population has long been doing." Kind of like "welcome to how the other half lives."

- It seems possible that in reality, people with more money will be able to buy their way out of the crisis somewhat (by paying private companies for water delivery, or in some cases by drilling wells on their properties, which isn't otherwise common in the metropolitan area).

- My household has been using about 33 liters per day per person, using pretty standard and obvious water conservation measures (less use of washing machine, minimizing showers, reclaiming shower water with buckets). This is slightly inconvenient but basically allows life to continue normally.

- The whole crisis is massively connected to local and regional politics -- I've only been down here since September so I don't totally understand, but it has to do with the ANC running the country and the oppositional party (the Democratic Alliance) running Cape Town. Some people say that there has been very little assistance from the national government because the ANC sees no reason to assist their political opposition.

- Lots of rumors about private enterprise maneuvering to profit massively from the water crisis -- I even heard a pretty credible story about organized crime using threats of force to extract water from one of the local springs (which are a relatively small but non-negligible source of additional water).

- There's a bit of a generalized sense of panic, like "maybe it will end in total social breakdown, anarchy in the pejorative sense." I can't tell how much of this is reasonable but my guess is that it would have everything to do with how well an alternative water distribution system could be organized.

- One other weird political thing is that, I would think, logically, if you were the city government and you had calculated the maximum available water ration, you would want to start by sanctioning people who exceeded it, instead of just letting the water get used up and then having a complete system failure. There have been threats of increased charges for people who exceed quota, which is a small step in that direction, but it baffles me that they haven't just shut off the taps first for people who are over quota. Apparently there is massive local politics around this (even having a more punitive charge for quota exceeding was recently shot down).

I can provide a lot of links to local news sources if anyone is interested. I haven't seen really great coverage in the international media.

South Africa should be on everyone’s list:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVtyKWylFkt/?taken-by=mmellinger...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVtxGoVlh6E/?taken-by=mmellinger...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVtx6EylczC/?taken-by=mmellinger...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVtxqkfFrW7/?taken-by=mmellinger...