Pod Insights Short Wave Day Zero: When the wells run dry About this episode In honor of World Water Day, Short Wave is exploring the ways water touches our lives. From increasing water shortages around the world, to how it’s affecting agriculture and aquifers. We’re starting with “day zero”: the day a city or place runs out of water. Cape Town, Mexico City, Chennai in India are just a few places that have come close to day zero events. Today, we talk to experts and hear from someone who lived in Cape Town during the crisis about why we’re overdue for rethinking our relationship to water.
This is part of a whole series on the world's dwindling water supply. Check out the rest of the water series:
Part 1 http://lnk.to/Ty93au: When the wells run dryPart 2 http://lnk.to/os7Fci: The world's groundwater problemPart 3 https://lnk.to/7Mz2Ng: Freshwater's growing salt problem
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
0:20 Speaker 01 Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson. Hi. Hey, Gina. Hey. So in honor of World Water Day, you and Burley, another producer here at Short Wave, are exploring the ways water touches our lives, from increasing water shortages around the world to how it's affecting agriculture and aquifers. And I've been looking specifically into that first part: shortages.
0:40 Speaker 02 For much of the world, normal is gone.
0:44 Speaker 01 Earlier this year, the United Nations declared the dawn of a new era: global water bankruptcy.
0:49 Speaker 02 Calling for a fundamental shift in how the global community understands our most vital resource: water.
0:57 Speaker 01 Cave Medani is the director of the UN University's Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. And that clip is from a press conference in January. But Cave's been thinking about water for way longer than that. He grew up in Tehran with two parents who worked in the water industry. Which, of course, is now experiencing more intense water crises because of the war. Yeah, and he says he's been sounding the alarm about water in Tehran for years.
1:23 Speaker 02 I'm known back home for a person who was warning about these days. So this is happening. And then media contacts me and says, how do you feel?
1:32 Speaker 01 And what does he say?
1:33 Speaker 02 I wish I was wrong. It's miserable to feel and to know that your compatriots are suffering, you are going to suffer. And the chaos, the fear, the stress. Even in my darkest projections, I was not thinking that Tehran would hit this day so early.
1:53 Speaker 01 And the longer this goes on, the closer Tehran could get to something called Day Zero, when a city or a place runs out of water. Right. We've seen places come close to Day Zero, right? So Cape Town in South Africa, Mexico City, Chennai in India.
2:10 Speaker 02 Tehran is not the first place that has experienced a situation like this, and it won't be the last one.
2:18 Regina Barber? Today on the show, what happens when the taps run dry? How cities are coping and why experts say we're overdue for rethinking our relationship to water. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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4:02 Regina Barber? Rachel, I think the first time I heard about Day Zero was in 2018 for Cape Town's water crisis.
4:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, Cape Town's a really big one. And I want to go back even a little further to 2017. Cape Town was experiencing a huge drought. Some water restrictions were in place and people were starting to think about how to conserve water a little bit more.
4:23 Speaker 06 You don't have to shower every day. We shower every other day, every three days. Make the showers shorter.
4:28 Speaker 01 That's Erin Baker. She's a freelance journalist who lived in Cape Town from 2014 to 2021.
4:33 Regina Barber? Wow, she was there when all of this was going down.
4:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, and she remembers it all super vividly. Erin says in the midst of the drought, a lot of people were holding out hope, kind of like.
4:43 Speaker 06 Well, the rains are going to come, the reservoirs will fill up.
4:46 Speaker 01 But they didn't. And the rains?
4:49 Speaker 06 They kept not coming.
4:51 Speaker 01 On February 1st, 2018, every resident in Cape Town was limited to a maximum of 50 liters, or about 13 gallons of water per person per day.
5:01 Regina Barber? How much is that? Like, what can you do with 13 gallons?
5:04 Speaker 01 Not a ton. So the EPA says the average person in the US uses 82 gallons of water per day.
5:11 Regina Barber? Ooh.
5:12 Speaker 01 So 13 gallons?
5:14 Speaker 06 That's one 90-second shower. Two liters of drinking water. If you have a dog, you always have to count in your dog. That's one sink worth of hand-washed dishes or laundry. One or the other, not both.
5:31 Speaker 06 One cooked meal, two washings of your hands, two brushing of your teeth, and one flush of the toilet.
5:37 Speaker 01 So Erin is doing the math. She's making all of these calculations and trying to figure out, like, how many times do I really need to flush the toilet? Even her daughter, who's seven or eight at the time, is aware of it, too.
5:50 Speaker 06 Like, no, mommy, we can't. I can't shower. I can't take a bath today because of the water, water issues.
5:56 Regina Barber? Wow, yeah. So like, even kids are taking personal responsibility?
5:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, Erin told me that the kids were learning about it in school and just all of these questions were circulating.
6:06 Speaker 06 Do you really want to use your precious water supply, even if it's recycled water? Do you really want to use it for the toilet?
6:12 Regina Barber? I want to break this down, though. Like, how does a city like Cape Town get to this point?
6:16 Speaker 01 When it comes to day zero, the exact circumstances of every city are different. But there are a few things that they tend to have in common. Among them, leaky infrastructure, mismanagement of water, depleting aquifers, and more people living in cities. Meaning more demand for water in concentrated regions.
6:34 Regina Barber? And climate change?
6:36 Speaker 01 And climate change, yeah. I talked to Filippo Menga. He's a professor of geography at the University of Bergamo in Italy. And he referred to climate change as...
6:45 Speaker 02 An enormous sort of bonus card.
6:49 Speaker 01 Really not the bonus card you want when your deck already includes all those other things.
6:54 Regina Barber? Yeah, and I know we're gonna get into like one of those factors, aquifers, that's tomorrow's episode, but Rachel, maybe for today, can we just zoom into that bad infrastructure part?
7:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, I talked about this with Manuel Perlo. He's an economist in Mexico City where there's been an ongoing water crisis for years.
7:12 Speaker 02 Thirty to thirty-five percent of the available water gets lost in leaks in the public distribution system, yes.
7:26 Regina Barber? Wait, like leaky pipes?
7:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's a global problem. In the US, the EPA estimates around one trillion gallons of water each year are wasted just from household leaks. So there's a big engineering problem.
7:39 Regina Barber? And a financial one, right?
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then on top of that, in Mexico City.
7:43 Speaker 02 Another 10% gets stolen from the system.
7:48 Regina Barber? What does he mean by stolen?
7:50 Speaker 01 When water is scarce, it's also profitable. So cartels or groups will steal water from pipes and then sell them for a lot of money.
7:58 Speaker 02 So you have around 50% of the water lost on its way to the consumers.
8:06 Speaker 01 Other estimates say it's around 40%, but either way, the distribution of who is actually getting water usually isn't equal.
8:16 Speaker 02 Large parts of the population do not get water at all in Mexico City. They are not attached, connected with the public water system. They've never been connected. Those are the people that live in a day zero situation always.
8:39 Regina Barber? Okay, so for some people, day zero has been here for years already.
8:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
8:44 Speaker 02 Lower income groups spent a lot of their family income.
8:48 Speaker 04 In water, sometimes 20% of their whole income. They are the ones who suffer the most, but the problem affects the whole city. There is no question about that.
9:01 Speaker 01 That's something Erin brought up too, especially for a lot of less wealthy people in Cape Town and the surrounding areas. They were already experiencing water scarcity for years before the drought and before water restrictions went into place.
9:14 Speaker 06 So the shanty towns and the townships, they were not wasting water because these were the people who had to fill buckets to take the water to their house. So obviously they understand the value of water because it's it's measured in in backache.
9:32 Speaker 01 There was one study published in the journal Nature a couple of years ago, and it looked at all of this after the fact. They used a model to estimate that the wealthiest households in Cape Town were using over 50 times more water than the lowest income houses they looked at. But everyone had to cut down on their water use or risk being fined, even people who weren't using very much to begin with.
9:56 Regina Barber? Wow. So even the restrictions weren't necessarily equitable either.
9:59 Speaker 01 Exactly.
10:00 Regina Barber? So what did end up happening in Cape Town in 2018?
10:04 Speaker 01 Cape Town city officials knew they were in big trouble when it came to water, so they'd started building temporary desalination plants as an emergency measure to have more fresh water for people to use for drinking. But what actually let the city avoid day zero?
10:18 Speaker 04 What happened was that it started to rain.
10:21 Regina Barber? Wow.
10:22 Speaker 01 Filippo called it a mesianic rain, and I mentioned that to Erin and she agreed.
10:27 Speaker 06 Oh, it felt so good. It did. Yeah, it's totally, it was totally biblical. I mean, we were all, I mean, it's not like we were dancing in the streets. It was cold. But I mean, you do have this sense of relief.
10:38 Regina Barber? Oh, but that's not something you can count on in the future.
10:41 Speaker 01 Right, especially not with climate change. They were super lucky. And Erin says a few years later during COVID, all she could think about was how many times every single day people were washing their hands.
10:54 Regina Barber? Yeah.
10:54 Speaker 06 And I was thinking, if we had had the water crisis combined with COVID. And the sanitary, the sanitary measures that you needed, that would have been a freaking disaster.
11:05 Speaker 01 So you can kind of hear Gina, Aaron's mindset around water has flipped since 2017. And that's the kind of thing Cave says needs to happen for all of us. Because people often assume water is abundant. Or maybe at worst, they say there's a crisis, but-
11:21 Speaker 02 How can something be a crisis for almost 15 years? Maybe this is a wrong terminology for a chronic problem.
11:30 Speaker 01 At this point, Cave says maybe we're past the point of crisis.
11:34 Speaker 02 A crisis is a shock. It's a temporary deviation from a normal that you're used to.
11:42 Speaker 02 But if, if the crisis is, is there forever, if it becomes chronic, it's part of the system. That's an essential element of the system that you need to face.
11:52 Regina Barber? OK, so he's saying the situation isn't temporary. So we need to like completely change our approach to water.
11:59 Speaker 01 Exactly. And my conversations with people like Cave, who study water, and people like Aaron, who understand how precious water is, all came down to one thing. We treat water like it's free, but we can't.
12:14 Speaker 02 Whenever you have, you have touched the tap, you have had water. And all of a sudden, you have to get used to a, a new sort of life.
12:23 Speaker 06 Even now, if I hear a dripping faucet, I have a visceral reaction to like, this is precious stuff. We can't, we can't let that go.
12:34 Regina Barber? Rachel, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.
12:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, thank you, Gina.
12:41 Regina Barber? If you liked this episode, tune in tomorrow. We've got another water story for you, this time on aquifers, the water beneath your feet. And if you have a second, could you share this episode with a friend? It helps us grow and it helps us continue to make episodes like this one. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact checked by Aru Nayar. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
13:28 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
13:47 Speaker 05 This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll. It shows Democrats still poised to make gains, but also with some warning signs for just how many. We'll explain on the NPR Politics Podcast.
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