This is a long overdue post. Australia has been in drought for many years and I’ve had frequent reports from my parents and friends to say that stored water is down to a couple of months for major population centres. You can see from the Sydney Water website that we use nearly 1500 Megalitres per day, but that we have only 1 million ML in our dams. That leaves enough water for 2 years assuming no more rain – probably 4 years at the rate we’ve had in the last 8 years. The graph at the bottom tells the story better. At the end of 1998, the dam was full. Over the next 8 years, it’s fallen to 37%.
While other countries complain about having too much rain, even the coastal regions of Australia are facing the prospect of running out of water. The government is arguing about how money should be spent to address the problem. The side in power has put all effort against recycling and desalination. Parks are watered with recycled water and I’ve heard talk of flushing toilets with recycled water too. The opposition wants to focus on better collection of the little rainwater we actually get. We’ve had a good run of rain since I got back, including one deluge that dumped 30 billion litres of water on Sydney in one day. A newspaper article stated that of that, only 1.5 billion litres was collected by Sydney Water. Another 5 million (now I’m stretching my memory) may have been picked up by private rainwater tanks, which is another activity that Sydney Water is pushing.
Either way, we’re all hoping that the current rains will continue through the next year because it will take at least that much to relieve the stress on our current water systems. If not, we may all be drinking bottled water and washing in sea water.
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