Hosepipe ban

Sorry, but it amazes me that people take this view. Why don't you justify why you think a wet April is enough for the ban to be listed?

 

In the 70's/80's Northumbrian Water (as it was then) invested in a MAJOR Reservoir (Keilder Water).
They recognised the need to conserve available water to maintain good supplies.
We in the North now have no problems at all with water shortages. It's not just down to the rotton weather either.
Other water authorities failed to follow the lead and now annually claim shortages. The customer are the ones to suffer.
The Water Authorities need to justify why THEY failed to meet the demands of their customers.
Rant over.

 

I hear you and hopefully that works well for your area. Do you have a hose pipe ban? Hopefully not given the local water resources you have.

Reservoirs are a luxury that the South East does not have for several reasons: most of the South East doesn't have rivers that have enough flow to make storage in reservoirs cost effective (water companies have to leave flow for agriculture too, and environmental needs), and in densely populated areas there isn't the space. We also don't have any "mountains" that provide the opportunity for deep storage in a relatively small area, the place is what I would call "undulating" and outsiders would call "flat as a pancake"!. My pond evaporates at 1/2" per week in Summer I reckon??, which, if that applies to reservoirs too, particularly ones with a shallow ratio of area-to-depth, is very wasteful - in the absence of significant rainfall / river flow to replenish them.

Consequently South East gets most of its water from boreholes (I seem to remember reading that we get less rainfall than Israel, so provision of water needs to be even more "efficient" than in such arid countries). The main downside of that is that we cannot "catch" the rainfall from an exceptionally wet month like this April, as it takes time to percolate through the soil into the aquifer; the upside is that, once it has percolated down, we have a huge resource that smooths out the peaks-and-troughs between wet & dry years. However, the South East has had the driest 18 months (apart from April) for 150 years I believe - and April only reduced the "deficit" by some 5% :(. There is no way that consumers would have been prepared to pay for the cost of storage of water for a once in a century event, nor do I think we should attempt to tool-up for such an infrequent event, particularly if the Water Company is right that we only need to save 5% - 10% in order to tide us over - its not that hard to achieve with some community spirit & effort. (We could, presumably, have "tooled up" for such an event by making boreholes considerably deeper - but I expect the additional cost would have been impossible to justify at the outset.)

Kent and the like have built more houses than the water infrastructure can supply, that's clearly daft and someone should be hung out to dry as a consequence. I would prefer that we had no leaks etc., and I may quibble with the speed at which the water companies are correcting that issue, but they have done a lot since privatisation and I doubt the consumers would be happy to pay what it would cost to fix the dilapidated state of the infrastructure faster; but I also think there is a huge PR opportunity for water companies that can show that they are making remarkable achievements, rather than just doing as little as they have to and in the mean time paying themselves and their cronies bonuses and dividends that Jo Public quite rightly perceives as obscene.

 

gcc3663 = 15
Kristen = 30
"new balls please"
Must be almost time for afternoon tea chaps.

Jenny namaste

 

That sounds rude

 

So does 15 love. Wouldn't type that into a search engine

 

Not with safe search off.

 

Not an avid tennis watcher but Iv'e heard this phrase shouted out on Centre court with the great, the good and Royalty watching. Anyway,poor light has stopped play now and we must get back to the thread chaps.
Jenny namaste

 

The tone gets lowered once again. Tut!

 

Along with the water table

 

The Indians can de-salinate sea water for very cheap .... why can't we?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10819040

 

Good ideas there. I don't object to the cost of the drainage on the basis that its actually solving two problems - improving flood response, and catching water in summer that is currently wasted during torrential downpours and flash-floods.

I have trouble catching all the rain that falls in a thunderstorm ... nice drizzle is much better, doesn't overwhelm the tiddly greenhouse gutters, nor people's downpipe diverters (although my downpipes go straight into the water butts to avoid that problem)