How Cape Town Dodged Day Zero – “We’ll never, ever, ever take water for granted again.”

Late last year, as the South African government faced the prospect of its largest city running out of water, they took an unprecedented gamble.

The government announced “day zero” – a moment when dam levels would be so low that they would turn off the taps in Cape Town and send people to communal water collection points.

This apocalyptic notion prompted water stockpiling and panic, caused a drop in tourism bookings, and raised the spectre of civil unrest.

It also worked. After years of trying to convince residents to conserve, the aggressive campaign jolted people into action. Water use was (and still is) restricted to 50 litres per person per day. (In 2016, average daily per capita use in California was 321 litres.) Households that exceed the limit face hefty fines, or having a meter installed in their home that shuts off their water once they go over.

Capetonians started showering standing over buckets to catch and re-use that water, recycling washing machine water, and limiting loo flushes to once a day.

“It was the most talked about thing in Cape Town for months when it needed to be,” says Priya Reddy, the city’s communication director. “It was not a pretty solution, but it was not a pretty problem.”

Cape Town’s water use dropped from 600m litres per day in mid 2017 to 507m litres per day at the end of April. That’s still short of the 450m the city should be using, but Reddy says it couldn’t have been achieved otherwise. “We really did need to make it alarming enough, otherwise day zero would have happened.”

“The day zero campaign made us all think twice about water,” says Sue Fox, after collecting several litres of drinking water for her household from a natural spring in Newlands, an upmarket Cape Town enclave. “We’ll never, ever, ever take water for granted again.”