CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: Good for them: Online Vendors Try to Make a Quick Buck as Cape Town Runs Out of Water Fri Jan 26, 2018 9:05 pm | |
| Day Zero—currently predicted to be April 12 by local [url=http://www.capetown.gov.za/Media-and-news/Non-water savers urged to join Team Cape Town water savers as Day Zero moves forward to 12 April 2018]officials[/url]—is the exact day when the city of Cape Town in South Africa will run out of water.
This may sound like a far-fetched, dystopian hellscape. But Cape Town has been dealing with ongoing drought for three years now because of a host of factors, including poor government planning, all aggravated by climate change. The dams and reservoirs that supply the city of an estimated 4 million people are running dangerously low. Already under water use restrictions, residents will soon have to collect rations of water piped into the city at centralized points, protected by armed guards. Meanwhile, some entrepreneurial folks in the area seem to have looked for opportunities to make cash in the drought, as reporter Aryn Baker mentioned in Time. On sites like Gumtree and Junk Mail, South Africa’s Craigslist-like online classifieds, dozens of vendors have started selling water, water tankers, water pumps, and filters to meet the demand where the government has not. On Gumtree, several services advertise water deliveries for drinking, storing, or filling up swimming pools. The vendors appear to be small companies or individuals, pumping water from boreholes or rain dams and delivering thousands of liters in tankers and milk trucks. One of them, Water@Langerbergkaas, was started just last month, by two brothers about 140 miles from Cape Town, according to their website. The existing ads selling water on Gumtree date back to November.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne4gqm/online-vendors-try-to-make-a-quick-buck-as-cape-town-runs-out-of-water
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