This may strike people dwelling in other cities as a little weird, but for us it is nearly a yearly experience. You see, our town's water supply comes from the Kuiseb river. This is a river that rarely has any visible water, and the riverbed is actually a popular destination for people that want to camp under a tree for a day. The drive is also quite nice if one drives up the delta. :)
Unfortunately, when the rest of Namibia gets good rainfall, and the Kuiseb river starts flowing, it destroys the pumps and pipes that supply our water. One would think that with the 20 million Namibian dollars that was spent on this system last year our water supply would be safe this year, but no such luck. We had some pretty heavy rains, and the river ran deeper and more strongly than in previous years. You can tell how thoroughly we are desert dwellers by just how unprepared we are for rain.
Roofs were leaking all over town, and for a
month all the hardware stores were sold out of roofing felt. Even I was up on a ladder with a few tubes of silicone, patching holes in the roof of my garage. The town's streets were flooded as we don't have any storm drains, and the normal sewage system was just not up to the task. I sneakily opened the sewage drain in front of my house to drain a lot of the water in the street away. There were water trucks all over town, sucking up the larger puddles.So, yes... severe water restrictions, with taps only running a couple of hours per day, and everybody had lots of drums of water, just for in case the taps do not come on at night. Luckily, with my families love for camping, we had no shortage of water containers, and we tackled the shortage as a little bit of a challenge. We filled our toilet from the pool during the day when the water was off, and adjusted our schedules according to the availability of water. Dishes were done at night, and our lawns only got water from the washing machine.
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