346 AAssignmentsReading #6

In 2017, the city of Cape Town, South Africa’s second most-
important economic center, began to run out of water. Experiencing
a drought of historic proportions, officials in the city of nearly four
million people watched with trepidation as water levels in key
reservoirs declined at alarming rates. Most worried was Patricia de
Lille, a former laboratory technician and labor- union leader who
served as Cape Town’s mayor. “ We are in a very serious crisis and
we know there are still some customers who are acting as if our
resources are not under strain,” she warned in February 2017.1 In
October 2017, de Lille said that “[i] f consumption is not reduced
to the required levels of 500 million liters (132 million gallons) of
collective use per day, we are looking at about March 2018 when
supply of municipal water would not be available.”2 The fateful
date soon became more precise: March 13, 2018. The countdown
began to what came to be known as Day Zero— the day when, for
the first time in modern history, the taps of a major city would
run dry.