Here we go again. A drier spring than usual has led to reservoir levels being 15% down on the average for this time of year, and we're already getting water companies warning of hosepipe bans and giving us advice on how to save water.
Apparently leaving the tap running while you're cleaning your teeth wastes 7 litres. Imagine that! And then imagine the fact that United Utilities (previously Northwest Water) wastes considerably more each day through leaks. And when I say considerably more, I mean orders of magnitude more. I mean 460 million litres. Per day. "Chief Reporter" Dave Guest pointed this out to the water authority stooge on the telly last week and got the same old reply. We have an ongoing programme of leak control in place. Yeah, and you've been saying that for the last ten years to my certain knowledge. After ten years of "ongoing" leak control, you're still losing 460 million litres a day. How bad was it when you started, ferchrissake?
It's a total disgrace that water companies up and down the country are STILL allowed to sit on miles of old, dodgy, perforated piping and yet declare "profits" every year. Profits that come from ordinary households paying over the odds for their water supplies, only to be told to cut their usage in times of drought. Not even drought, actually. It's been raining on and off for weeks. There is no drought. If this is a drought God help us if it ever gets as "bad" as the oft-quoted summer of 1976 when we went 10 weeks without any rain at all.
Let's do the maths together. If you wanted, through the simple expedient of not running your tap while you were cleaning your teeth, to save the water wasted by our local water company in a single day, it would take over 65 million people changing their behaviour to do it. The entire population of the UK. And then what could we all do to save the wastage by Southern Water? And Severn Trent Water? And Thames Water? And Yorkshire Water? There are 20 water companies serving the UK. 20 companies pissing our expensive, treated, potable water out of their pipes and back into the lakes, rivers and streams, and all the while shelling out the money we've paid them to supply our water, to their shareholders, as "profit."
You couldn't make it up.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It's an overall ennui that has set in. I'm a yank and sickened by BP and the US Government's mangling of the Gulf oil rig explosion/devastation - caused not only by greed but by nonchalance, carelessness and an outright I-don't-give-a-damn attitude from both nations and big business.
Our water supply should be precious - cherished. And in fact when it starts getting more scarce, suddenly we'll all be thirsty and be enraged at all the things we "coulda shouda" done, but it will be too late.
Great blog, JB!
The cost of household water has risen again this year. We have an underground sprinkler system we haven't used in about three years. We let everything go dry. When it rains, it goes green again anyway.
My big beef is when, in the middle of a spring deluge (rain coming down so hard it's sideways) the City of Parksville sees fit to have the sprinklers going on City property!
How can they do that?
Post a Comment