I am revisiting my coverage of the 2018 Cape water crisis and the unused desalination plants that we are still collectively paying for… Please share your memories from that time; like how you used to help conserve the dwindling resources.
I believe i went through three different innovations to help solve the toilet flushing problem.
I still remember the smell of the shower water we used to flush the toilets - a little soapy, a little old from sitting in the bucket, and a little sour when thrown into the toilet bowl that didn’t get flushed after each use anymore.
I know that smell well. My sisters are water saving maximalists, with sometimes three buckets of stale greywater in the toilet - which I always forget to use when visiting.
Ahead of the pointy end of Day Zero (that thankfully never arrived), I commissioned a photographer to take some documentary style photos of me going through the daily water rituals of the time.
If you read the accompanying story, it might seem like history is about to repeat itself - and this is what I aim to find out.
This excerpt from The Child by South African author Alistair Mackay always sticks with me, describing the 2018 water restrictions:
“Adrian and I can’t bring ourselves to stop collecting the run-off when we shower, even after it rains. The buckets start lining up in the bathroom, full of soap-scummed grey water with nowhere to go. The coartyard plants don’t need it any more. We keep our showers shorter than one minute. There’s always the faint smell of unflushed piss in the bathroom, and on bad days, the muted but unmistakable smell of sewage throughout the house. Stale and sweet. Sibs tells me it’s because the council decreased the water pressure throughout the city to save water, and so the drains back up. The waste rises out of the earth and into the pipes. We’re the lucky ones, I know. Sibs also tells me about the communal toilets in the townships. They overflow when it rains like this. The sewage mixes with stormwater, and floods between the shacks. The Cape Flats is a floodplain.”
