Feb 14, 2018 3 min read

Thirteen gallons of water. That’s quite a bit to use every day, right?

Well, maybe not. Aryn Baker, the Africa bureau chief for Time, tallied it up, and found that being restricted to using 13 gallons of water daily is only enough for the following: a shower lasting exactly 90 seconds; a half-gallon of drinking water; a full sink of water in which to do laundry or wash dishes; two hand washings; two teeth brushings; one cooked meal; and one flush of the toilet.

That’s not really that much, but that’s what the residents of Cape Town, South Africa, have had to make do with in recent days, as the city of 4 million people has had to grapple with a water shortage sparked by a lingering drought and robust population growth.

Along with painful restrictions on how much water they can consume – radio stations there have taken to playing two-minute songs so people can keep track of how long they are in the shower – residents of Cape Town have become so desperate for water that they rushed outside and grabbed buckets the other day when it actually rained.

OK, somewhere on the other side of the world, a place that few of us have ever visited, is having a water crisis. It’ll lift soon enough, and it doesn’t impede anybody in this neck of the woods from luxuriating in the tub or, in a couple of months, firing up the lawn sprinkler.

Not so fast. Cape Town’s water woes might prove to be more enduring. So much so, in fact, that the city’s taps are forecast to go dry in May, a juncture that’s been dubbed “Day Zero.” When that happens, Cape Town officials plan on setting up about 200 collection points and further curtailing water use to six gallons per day for every resident. This could set the table for some serious strife in a city with thousands of people in it.

And we shouldn’t be so certain we can watch it unfold at a comfortable reserve, confident that our water supplies are safe.

Climate change, and the weather extremes it brings, could imperil drinking water in other parts of the industrialized world, including the United States.

Aside from persistent drought conditions, Cape Town has been hobbled by poor planning, an outmoded infrastructure and a dire lack of forethought by its leaders. We unfortunately have all those in abundance in this country.

Geoff Dabelko, the director of Ohio University’s environmental studies program, told National Geographic, “Frankly, where it gets dangerous is the inability of our political institutions to keep up. The overriding story of the coming decade is going to be about how well our institutions deal with the increased rate of change.”

Officials in South Africa will now have no other choice but to react to the events unfolding there, whether it’s carrying out water-recycling projects or building desalination facilities so that seawater can be used for human consumption. It will take an immense amount of work. The rest of the world needs to heed the lessons Cape Town offers if we want to avoid even more Day Zeros.