Day Zero: When the wells run dry

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 Interested in more science behind current events? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Speaker 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.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  For much of the world, normal is gone.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Earlier this year, the United Nations declared the dawn of a new era: global water bankruptcy.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Calling for a fundamental shift in how the global community understands our most vital resource: water.

• 0:57Speaker 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.

• 1:23Speaker 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?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  And what does he say?

• 1:33Speaker 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.

• 1:53Speaker 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.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Tehran is not the first place that has experienced a situation like this, and it won't be the last one.

• 2:18Regina 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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• 4:02Regina Barber?

  Rachel, I think the first time I heard about Day Zero was in 2018 for Cape Town's water crisis.

• 4:08Speaker 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.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  You don't have to shower every day. We shower every other day, every three days. Make the showers shorter.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  That's Erin Baker. She's a freelance journalist who lived in Cape Town from 2014 to 2021.

• 4:33Regina Barber?

  Wow, she was there when all of this was going down.

• 4:35Speaker 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.

• 4:43Speaker 06

  Well, the rains are going to come, the reservoirs will fill up.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  But they didn't. And the rains?

• 4:49Speaker 06

  They kept not coming.

• 4:51Speaker 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.

• 5:01Regina Barber?

  How much is that? Like, what can you do with 13 gallons?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Not a ton. So the EPA says the average person in the US uses 82 gallons of water per day.

• 5:11Regina Barber?

  Ooh.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  So 13 gallons?

• 5:14Speaker 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.

• 5:31Speaker 06

  One cooked meal, two washings of your hands, two brushing of your teeth, and one flush of the toilet.

• 5:37Speaker 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.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  Like, no, mommy, we can't. I can't shower. I can't take a bath today because of the water, water issues.

• 5:56Regina Barber?

  Wow, yeah. So like, even kids are taking personal responsibility?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Erin told me that the kids were learning about it in school and just all of these questions were circulating.

• 6:06Speaker 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?

• 6:12Regina Barber?

  I want to break this down, though. Like, how does a city like Cape Town get to this point?

• 6:16Speaker 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.

• 6:34Regina Barber?

  And climate change?

• 6:36Speaker 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...

• 6:45Speaker 02

  An enormous sort of bonus card.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Really not the bonus card you want when your deck already includes all those other things.

• 6:54Regina 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?

• 7:05Speaker 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.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Thirty to thirty-five percent of the available water gets lost in leaks in the public distribution system, yes.

• 7:26Regina Barber?

  Wait, like leaky pipes?

• 7:27Speaker 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.

• 7:39Regina Barber?

  And a financial one, right?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then on top of that, in Mexico City.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Another 10% gets stolen from the system.

• 7:48Regina Barber?

  What does he mean by stolen?

• 7:50Speaker 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.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  So you have around 50% of the water lost on its way to the consumers.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Other estimates say it's around 40%, but either way, the distribution of who is actually getting water usually isn't equal.

• 8:16Speaker 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.

• 8:39Regina Barber?

  Okay, so for some people, day zero has been here for years already.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Lower income groups spent a lot of their family income.

• 8:48Speaker 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.

• 9:01Speaker 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.

• 9:14Speaker 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.

• 9:32Speaker 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.

• 9:56Regina Barber?

  Wow. So even the restrictions weren't necessarily equitable either.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:00Regina Barber?

  So what did end up happening in Cape Town in 2018?

• 10:04Speaker 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?

• 10:18Speaker 04

  What happened was that it started to rain.

• 10:21Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Filippo called it a mesianic rain, and I mentioned that to Erin and she agreed.

• 10:27Speaker 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.

• 10:38Regina Barber?

  Oh, but that's not something you can count on in the future.

• 10:41Speaker 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.

• 10:54Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 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.

• 11:05Speaker 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-

• 11:21Speaker 02

  How can something be a crisis for almost 15 years? Maybe this is a wrong terminology for a chronic problem.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  At this point, Cave says maybe we're past the point of crisis.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  A crisis is a shock. It's a temporary deviation from a normal that you're used to.

• 11:42Speaker 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.

• 11:52Regina Barber?

  OK, so he's saying the situation isn't temporary. So we need to like completely change our approach to water.

• 11:59Speaker 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.

• 12:14Speaker 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.

• 12:23Speaker 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.

• 12:34Regina Barber?

  Rachel, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Gina.

• 12:41Regina 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.

• 13:28Speaker 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.

• 13:47Speaker 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.