This is well off topic, but come visit. You may well, no - you WILL be suprised.
Our biggest import/export is via Port of Durban and COEGA further south, but CT is really important regionally - we have a slightly weird system in that the seat of government is more like a lounge suite. Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town all share the rôle.
The drought that threatened “zero day” water can be attributed to climate change (La Nina/El Nino becoming more significant) that we - as a country - barely contribute towards, if we compare worldwide pollution rates of countries.
Down here in Australia we have faced quite a few water problems over the years. The Millennium Drought ran from 1997 to 2009 in the south east corner of the continent. At the end we had restrictions essentially banning any use of water for domestic purposes outside. Many people just let their gardens die.
Here in Adelaide we now have a desalination plant capable of 300 mega litres a day. Built at a cost of 1.3 billion AUD. It has sat largely idle for the last decade. But is being brought on stream now to cope with a short drought that is maybe just ending. It’s capacity actually frees up limited river water for irrigation.
A lot of people got used to doing things like diverting and storing grey water for other useful purposes. The modern world is remarkably wasteful of water, and simple changes can result in significant reductions in use. Not that we ever got to the point of the crisis in Cape Town, it was a long, year on year, grind. I don’t think attitudes to water use have ever reverted to those of pre-1997. People don’t lay out lush gardens anymore. Water remains expensive even if it isn’t restricted.
We look nervously at sea surface temperature changes. Only a small change can swing us between drought and plentiful rain.
For a city of the size of Tehran, it is one thing to drop back to basic preservation of life levels of water, but keeping food production going and the industry supporting daily life going is another matter. 12 million people wandering lost in the desert isn’t exactly an answer. For all their problems, Iran is an industrialised nation with significant capability and a well educated populace. Whether their government and religious leaders have the wherewithal to manage such a crisis is another matter.
I meant “anyone else” as in the international community. Nobody’s feeling sorry enough for Iran to spend however many millions or billions of dollars to crash-build a water pipeline to Tehran because they can’t handle basic stuff like this due to neglect, mismanagement and corruption.
That’s what they did in Chennai back in 2019, I believe.
Due to rotten and inadequate infrastructure, most of Mexico City gets its water delivered by truck to individual addresses. And has done so for decades.
For much of the city, any water pumped into the pipes simply disappears uselessly into leaks. So it’s sort of a giant aquifer recharge system. Which is pointless since the water is obtained by pumping up groundwater. As such, the pipes are simply abandoned in place; no water is put in, and none leaks out. And as the city has grown beyond the limits of the older piping systems, new water lines simply aren’t installed. The tankering system works … enough.
Believe me, I’m not defending it. Just explaining it.
Like most semi-poor still-industrializing countries, they struggle with getting enough tax revenue to build and then maintain modern services to modern cities. Which makes it easy for various aspects, like water provision, to settle into an economic local optimum that’s far worse than the global optimum.
IOW: given no pipes, how do we provide water? Tanker trucks. Now given the fleet of tanker trucks & all the wastage of fuel and labor there, how do we also afford to build a comprehensive network of pipes under a huge already crowded city, set up the water supply and ongoing maintenance for such a system, connect every building to it, then turn it on? And ensure that maintenance isn’t scrimped on over the next 50 years until this system falls apart too. The good news is once we’ve done all that we can shut down the silly water tanker fleet and all the wasted effort & carbon emissions flowing from it.
The USA writ large has a vast problem with aging infrastructure that has been both undermaintained, and is now reaching the reasonable maximum life it was built for using the tech of the times when the USA was growing by leaps and bounds in the late 1800s to mid 1900s. Replacing all the plumbing under e.g. Chicago is a very big and expensive undertaking. Likewise replacing all the bridges. etc.
Oh I know, it just struck me as somewhat funny/sad that we need to cook the atmosphere to move water around, something that the romans had more or less in hand 2 millennia ago.
As noted with the now missing lake, the Aztecs didn’t have any problems with drinking water either.
But both the Romans and Aztecs were feeding far fewer people.
Tenochtitlan may have had 400,000 citizens, which would have made it among the largest cities on the planet at the time. The Mexico City metropolitan area has something like 22 million citizens.
Yes but they had far less technological power too.
In any case I guess that the best case scenario is that the trucks go electric and a cleaner source is found for the energy used.
Browsing Google Earth… It’s about 60 miles to the Caspian Sea, but following the fancy highway under construction, it goes through a number of tunnels which implies to me some serious mountain topography in the way - plus the winding narrow canyon nearer the sea. Topography seems to indicate it’s about 3,000 feet/1,000m above the sea level. Desalination and a pipeline would be no easy feat, certainly not someting to be constructed on short notice. I assume that it has not yet been attempted because until now regular rainfall has made that unneccessary? Or is this a problem that has been growing larger with the city’s growing population?
In Mexico City, part of the problem is that an earthquake comes through every so often and knocks down that carefully constructed stone-and-masonry aqueduct. Even low-Richter quakes in CdMX can result in large earth displacements due to the city being built largely on a sedimentary-earth plain - some of it reclaimed from an actual lake. This also wreaks havoc on underground piping systems.
What’s more, groundwater pumping in the basin has created uneven patterns of subsidence, putting even more strain on piping systems. It’s not hard to see why Mexico City built their pipes on the cheap and then were confronted with significantly greater maintenance costs than they expected.
Plus, Mexico is a nation with little investment capital but plenty of nationalized oil and gas resources, making it tempting to use the greenhouse-gas-generating methods to move water around rather than the capital-intensive pipes. This would point to a similar solution if Tehran found itself having to do the same thing.
I recall the news back in the 70’s(?) when there was a major quake in Mexico - the news mentioned that because of the sediment, the shaking in the Mexico City basin was like shaking a bowl of Jello - waves rebounded randomly off the edges to reinforce at some points - for example, one apartment tower was fine, while the one beside it simply tipped over.
But Tehran too is a fairly modern city. The issue does not appear to be distribution so much as source. There just aren’t many bodies of fresh water in the area.
