I’m a big gardener. I love to watch the hummingbird and
monarchs flit from flower to flower, and when I can, I like to add a new vine or
shrub for them to enjoy. When I can account for rain, that is.
This week’s projections of rain were a welcome sight, but as
yesterday came and went we were left with a whopping 0.04
inches. A pittance! And a pittance is the norm. In the last decade our
frequency of wet years has halved to once every four
years. It’s feeling awfully dry.
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| Wild Watsonias at Blue Gums, Cape Town |
Fortunately, we are in a shared situation. At the opposite
end of the globe, the Mother City of Cape Town, South Africa is wrestling with drought. They deal with the same Mediterranean climate as we do in San Diego, California – dry summers, wet winters. Well, usually wet winters – up to 31 inches, triple that of San Diego. Just like us, Cape Town has had to learn to store enough
water to get through the summer – and the occasional drought. Sitting at the tip
of Africa, the City is highly isolated and surrounded by desert, without the
opportunity to import supplies from distant watersheds.
Cape Town is also in the running for the world’s most beautiful
city. It sits at the foot of a majestic mountain on the edge of the ocean,
surrounded by abundant flora like their hundreds of native orchid species. I
had the good fortune of living there and enjoying their sweet water. I worked
with a team of lumberjacks to remove invasive plants
which were drying up a mountainside creek that we called Blue Gums. We didn’t
have pipes, just the clouds as they crashed into the peak of Cape Point and
replenished the flow. With the trees cleared, the stream turned to a creek, rushing
down the mountainside into the crashing waves.
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| Boulder Creek in San Diego, Feb 2018 |
The creek at Blue Gums is now just a trickle, in Cape Town’s
current drought conditions. And the pipes that feed the city are similarly
running dry. Here in San Diego, while the coastal areas have only received rain
twice since
last May, the mountain areas hold out with a small trickle, like this creek
flowing from Cuyamaca Peak.
The future is uncertain, and yet we optimistically act as
though we can forecast the next rain. In Cape Town, they are down to the wire,
with less than 100 days left before the City turns of the taps. And with that
kind of pressure, people are getting creative. This weekend, the Science Center
is holding an event to “Hack the
Water Crisis” to involve everyone in finding creative solutions to last the
City until the wet season.
Capetonians made the mistake of fully relying on their City Supply, without taking responsibility for individual consumption. They waited until the last minute, and are running out of time. In San Diego, we have the benefit of last year’s bountiful rain. We should take advantage of the time
that rain brought to us to adapt our own thirsty system to this new dry norm.
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I’ll keep you up to date with any brilliant ideas from the
Hack-a-Thon this weekend, the story of how we restored the stream at Blue Gums,
and applications for our everyday lives here in California.
