The Draught
If you think that England is a country in North Africa, you would be fogiven.
Yesterday, the first Draught orders since 1977 went out to a region just east from Tadley.
We haven’t seen the sun in two days. It is true that England is a lot drier than Scotland, but the lawn is lush and green and I haven’t even had to water our potted herbs yet. If I had to, there wouldn’t be a problem, because our rainwater barrel is brimming.
Back in 1991, I studied for an MSc in Aquatic Resource Management at King’s College London and I learned that the limestone aquifers in the South on England are overmined. Texans will be familiar with the concept. It takes so long for water to percolate back into the aquifers that—to all intents and purposes—mined ground water should be considered a finite resource. Something like 70% of people in the south of England depend on it for their water supplies.
Why is the situation so dire? Because when it privatised the water companies (why, oh why?) the government handed them a license to print money. While the directors and shareholders are lining their pockets, at least a quarter of the water is pissing out of broken pipes. Our lecturer was almost sympathetic—awfully hard to fix the leaks if they can’t be detected.
Meanwhile the little guys can’t use their hosepipes to water their gardens. Cricket grounds and golf courses will henceforth also be unwatered, but that doesn’t bother me a lot. What bothers me was archive footage of feeble grannies with big buckets queuing up at stand-pipes. Yep, stand-pipes may make a come-back.
A bit of investment in R&D has never done any harm. If you can’t invest in the solution, invest in solving the problem. If this was Japan, semi-autonomous robots(modelled on bathtub-toys) would already patrol the pipes and report back on any pressure changes. We had the technology back in the early nineties. Hell, we probably had it back in the Victorian age.
Meanwhile, people living in Israel can still take the odd shower.
Tags: Tadley Times, Tag Index
Denni