Water shortages, how do other countries cope?

Veni Vidi Vici

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We all know about the hosepipe bans and huge amounts of rainfall in the last few weeks, and are now being told the reason its not making a huge difference is the rainfall is too heavy and running off the land before soaking through.

That being the case how do hot countries like Australia manage or parts of America, Las Vegas for example? Places that go months and months without any rain. I know very little about this subject and it amazes me that a small country like the UK, that is completely surrounded by sea and gets more than its fair share of rain should be in this position.

Can they not filter sea water or is that not possible? If not what is the answer, surely there must be one.
 
That being the case how do hot countries like Australia manage

They don't use water in the same way as we do and treat it more as a precious commodity.

My sister lives in Australia and they don't use hoses to wash the cars or even leave the tap running whilst cleaning their teeth.
 
They don't use water in the same way as we do and treat it more as a precious commodity.

My sister lives in Australia and they don't use hoses to wash the cars or even leave the tap running whilst cleaning their teeth.

Really, is it that simple? So they don't store the water any different to us? It amazes me considering they have extreme droughts.
 
When I was last in Australia there certainly wasn't a lack of rain.
 
When I was last in Australia there certainly wasn't a lack of rain.

Does that have something to do with what part of Australia you are in though? Huge parts get very little rain, certainly nothing close to what we get.
 
Some hot countries use desalination plants, so take sea water and remove all the salt. Thinking about the Canary Islands etc with plenty of sea access.

But yes, the main problem is leaky underground pipes, people being too careless with water usage.
 
I worked in South Africa (Pretoria) in the early 1980s and they had no rain for a period of 2 years while I was there.

No problem. Could still water the lawns, wash cars etc because they have a national water grid, like our electricity grid. So no area goes without water.

However, SA has mountain ranges which produce lots of water and huge areas of land where lakes, resovoirs and dams can be built.

Unfortunately, we don't have the mountain ranges or the available land!
 
Because we get quite a lot of rain, we mainly use surface water storage (reservoirs). The issue is that this tends to evaporate quite fast and needs to be replenished by more rain. So if you get a period without rainfall, then shortages happen quickly.

In hotter places, they use underground storage, water towers and invest in systems to transport water to shortage areas. It's not really worth it over here.
 
That being the case how do hot countries like Australia manage or parts of America, Las Vegas for example? Places that go months and months without any rain.

Las Vegas is easy, the Hoover dam is 600 feet deep and 112 miles long and holds 35 cubic kilometres of water. It's catchment area is a massive 168,000 square miles, so when it does rain, they can collect a lot of water, so even though the annual rainfall is less than 4.5" that's around 52,000,000,000,000 litres. Not all of that will end up in the reservoir though.

The reservoir does fill up over winter though and 35 cubic kilometres is 35,000,000,000,000 litres, the population of Las Vegas is less than 600,000 so they can store around 60 million litres of water per resident :)

(My maths may well be out but you get the idea).
 
It's not really worth it over here.
In the current situation I would say it is well worth investing in it now.
They get more than enough money from us to do it too!
 
> In the current situation I would say it is well worth investing in it now.

Why though? How important is a hosepipe ban? I would rather do that every few years rather than build a whole lot more dodgy infrastructure. If people are fighting in shops for the last bottle of water then that would be different.
 
> In the current situation I would say it is well worth investing in it now.

Why though? How important is a hosepipe ban?
What about a future where water is a precious commodity (by that I mean scarce and expensive, I know it already is precious)? Maybe investment now would pay back multiple in years to come.
 
The Hoover Dam is massively down though, here's a photo I took last year. You can see how much water is missing from the colour difference in the rocks.

Its gone down a lot over the years, however IIRC there is still enough water in there to last 10-15 years without any rainfall of any type.

I'm sure they said when we were at the Dam that Vegas has drastically reduced its water usage over the last 10 years and the Lake is starting to fill again slowly.

There are simple things we can do though to reduce our water usage such as watering lawns and plants after the sun has gone down. This reduces the amount you actually need to use to water plants as most of the water will seep in to the soil and not evaporate in the sun.
 

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Living here in Spain for the last 8 years or so, i can only but laugh at the Uk's water shortage!!!
 
so, you're laughing in our general direction?
 
On the news one time they said the UK loses 3 billion litres or gallons not sure which every year in just leaking pipes. I had a cracked pipe at the front of my house and it was not fixed for nearly 2 days with water gushing out everywhere after reporting it.
 
I was in Saudi and they were watering the sand to stop dust lol. This country is a joke when it comes to water management
 
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We I used to live (North Queensland) although it was in the tropics and wet during the summer, it would get very dry in the winter. We used to live alongside a canal and used to make use of recycled rain water such as water butts for gardening and even drinking. There is also better use of recycled rain water by farmers.
 
I know very little about this subject and it amazes me that a small country like the UK, that is completely surrounded by sea and gets more than its fair share of rain should be in this position.

Although the UK is small in land area, we are one of the most densely populated countries in the world (or more specifically, England is). I think this is part of the reason why we struggle sometimes because the water we get has to supply over 60 million people.

I do agree that we shouldn't be having these problems with the amount of rainfall we get in this country. It's probably down to a lack of investment in the infrastructure (leaking pipes etc..) and not building new reservoirs due to lack of space.

Las Vegas is easy, the Hoover dam is 600 feet deep and 112 miles long and holds 35 cubic kilometres of water. It's catchment area is a massive 168,000 square miles, so when it does rain, they can collect a lot of water, so even though the annual rainfall is less than 4.5" that's around 52,000,000,000,000 litres. Not all of that will end up in the reservoir though.

The reservoir does fill up over winter though and 35 cubic kilometres is 35,000,000,000,000 litres, the population of Las Vegas is less than 600,000 so they can store around 60 million litres of water per resident :)

(My maths may well be out but you get the idea).

Last time I was out there (admittedly back in 2007) they were very worried about the water supply. The water level at the Hoover dam had dropped significantly over the years. You could see the white colouring on the rocks where the water level used to be (as Brumhee said).

Also, Las Vegas is a city of 2,000,000 people if you take the metropolitan area into account. It is also one of the fastest growing cities in the US, plus it has the year-round tourism to supply.
 
nwgarratt said:
On the news one time they said the UK loses 3 billion litres or gallons not sure which every year in just leaking pipes. I had a cracked pipe at the front of my house and it was not fixed for nearly 2 days with water gushing out everywhere after reporting it.

Leakage in england is actually lower than most other counties with similar geography
 

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