HI All,
The Morton Jaffray waterworks were built many years ago to cleanse water from Lake Chivero and pump it to Greater Harare
for distribution to both housing and industrial stands. Over the past few years, however, this delivery has had all sorts off issues.
The net result is the drilling of thousands of boreholes for those with underground water and the purchase thereof for those that haven’t – I fall into the latter category. Heavily laden trucks are seen travelling all around the suburbs worsening the already bad
state of our roads.
Those of you that lived in places like Bulawayo or Mutare some 30 years ago would have had to endure severe water rationing.
The idea of selling precious water from your borehole to residents on the other side of town had not been thought of.
With water rationing you were only allowed to receive a certain water limit per day – if you exceeded this your water was
automatically cut off.
We have just had a seemingly good rainy season so, right now, there are very few thoughts of drought or water saving
techniques being bandied around. But, what if, we have a repeat of the 1991 and 1992 countrywide droughts and the water
levels dropped to unsustainable levels?; if the majority of boreholes dried up? Would we have to implement water rationing?
Should we not all start to have some self-discipline with our personal water usage?
I list below a few things that people used to do:
- Brushing teeth – instead of just leaving the tap running you should fill a glass with enough water to do the job
- Shower instead of Bath – if you only had a bath then you would have had to place red tape at a point for just enough water to cover the basics
- Evening Toilet – used the motto: “If its yellow let it mellow;….”
- Limit shower time.
- Fill the sink for washing the dishes instead of cleaning individual plates with the water left running
Let’s all start thinking about water and what we can all do to not waste any. Ciao Mike G.