Because
How Many Days Of Water Does Cape Town Have Left?
was too long for a blog post title. In my humble opinion, anyway.
If you want to know the answer to that question, then you might find a visit to local website howmanydaysofwaterdoescapetownhaveleft.co.za informative.
I went there just that this morning and I saw this:
Really?
Yes, whatever method they’re using, described as:
using our recent consumption as a model for future usage
provides us with the frankly terrifying prospect of October 7th being the day at which Cape Town’s dams hit the apocalyptic 10% mark.
But I think that they’ve got it wrong.
I thought I’d give the rudimentary calculation a go myself.
I went for the mathematically simple:
method.
Long story short, according to the latest city figures, we have 250581 megalitres stored, which is 27.9% of total storage capacity. As has been mentioned ad nauseum, the last 10% of our capacity is “unusable”, so clearly we can only use the first 17.9% bit of that (which is 64.2% of 27.9%).
That’s 160767 megalitres.
And we’re using 642 megalitres a day. So I make that
250 days – April 7th 2018
Far more reasonable, and more than a bit of a difference. I even did it in purple for you, and look, it does fit with Clem Sunter’s prediction/calculation.
Look, if you are going to have a website that only has one purpose, at least make it accurate. Does HasZumaQuitYet need checking too (he said, hopefully)?
Not great. Anyway, all in all, it’s still an excellent reminder that one way or another, pretty soon the only thing we’re going to be waist deep in is Shit Creek.
Sans paddle.
(I think I can see what they’ve done, by the way: they’ve divided the 250581Ml by 100 instead of 27.9 before multiplying by 17.9. I just don’t know who to tell about it. No contact details on there, see?)