Water woes

There’s more in this morning’s paper about the water restrictions in Melbourne at the moment:

Mebourne faces strict water restrictions for at least another two years unless there are some rains “of biblical proportions”, the managing director of Yarra Valley Water has warned.

There’s a simple answer to restrictions, one which most city people wont contemplate and that’s to put in a tank to catch and store rainwater.

Last summer when it was so dry, a friend ordered a tank and was told there was a long waiting list. Suddenly within a short time, he had his tank. “How come”, I asked. “It rained”, he said, “and the supplier told me everyone cancelled their orders.” <Sigh> Some people just don’t get it.

In the long run, people will do what they want to do. They’ll water illegally if they can get away with it. Does a hose connected to an inside tap and running out the window constitute water used “inside the house”? I’ve got a hose connected to the washing machine’s cold water inlet at the moment. It’s part of our summer fire-protection plan because we’re in a bushfire zone. It’d be easy to squirt it out the door onto the garden on the pretext of ‘regular system checks’.

Ultimately the fairest way is to allocate each household a certain quantity of water and let people decide how they want to use it.

Until there’s no energy to pump it and no water in the dams to pump. That’s when life will really start to get interesting.