Cape Town Is an Omen
Rainfall in Cape Town is a dramatic affair. In the winter wet season, ominous clouds and strong winds rumble in from the northwest, carrying with them the life-saving moisture of the Atlantic Ocean and dumping it in cold buckets on the city bowl. For days at a time, storms batter and flood the city and surrounding areas, so much so that the region’s first Portuguese moniker was Cabo das Tormentas: “the Cape of Storms.” But residents accept the thrashing. They embrace it, even, because the rainy season provides all the water there is.
During one of those winter storms, I huddled in a meeting room at the University of Cape Town, catching my breath after a wet sprint through the campus, which is built into the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. I met with the hydrologist Piotr Wolski to discuss droughts. “I don’t know the workings of the city and the workings of the water supply systems—the pipes, and valves, and how it is managed—enough to be sure about this,” Wolski told me, “but I think that it is likely that Day Zero was never [going] to happen.”
The prediction had been that after years of an intense drought, Cape Town’s dams would be so depleted and local reservoirs so bone-dry that one day in the autumn of 2018—between March and May in the Southern Hemisphere—the city would cut off the water flowing to taps. That date, the “Day Zero” in question, captured the attention of Western press. Photographs of the brown, cracked mud flats where drinking water once flowed abounded. Papers wrote breathlessly about the doomsday scenario of mobilizing military assets to secure water distribution points, fearing the possibility of violent clashes over resources.
Day Zero didn’t happen—and as Wolski told me, it may have never been in the cards. But, over the course of a year, the idea really did deeply change the city all the same. Water scarcity, and the potential for a catastrophe, spurred upheaval and anxiety. During that time, a local government pushed a water-conservation agenda more ambitious than just about anything the world had seen. Cape Town faced political fallout and experienced widespread protests. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots in one of the most unequal cities on Earth became the center of discourse. The racial wounds of a post-apartheid country opened once more.
In its march to slash water consumption drastically, this metropolis of 4 million people also became a harbinger of how water will constrain global cities in the future, and how climate change will bring
