Looking for ways to save water via hackathon

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Cape Town - Locals participating in a water crisis hackathon this weekend have been challenged to “build resilience”, as the city’s Day Zero team battles to win its war against the ongoing drought. Sarah Rushmore, a City of Cape Town official who works on the Day Zero campaign, told participants at the hackathon briefing earlier this week the government needs citizen’s help. “The city can’t do this alone,” she said. Rushmore also said Day Zero was “still with us”. It has been pushed back to 2019, creating the impression that water savings were no longer a priority. “Day Zero is not over. The possibility of running out of water is real. How do we motivate people to keep saving water?” said Rushmore.

The hackathon, called Water Saving Design Sprint, is scheduled to take place in Woodstock.

The City of Cape Town and local start-up support organisation Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi) are running it.

CiTi’s head of innovation Michelle Matthews said they put out an open call to the public and anyone could sign up. Participants will form teams, work on a water crisis solution and then pitch it to experts for evaluation.

The challenge is to “design a digital campaign, tool or app that will motivate people to make water saving their new normal”.

Matthews told participants: “We don’t want to do something that isn’t thoughtful. You’re not going to have a product at the end (of the weekend) but we want to see a prototype.

“Cape Town is always going to be a water scarce region. This is not a one-time event.”

Rushmore meanwhile offered participants more details on the city’s water challenges.

Rushmore said efforts to keep municipal water consumption to 450 million litres per day remained essential to avoid Day Zero.

“We need to save water because we don’t know how much rainfall we will have (this year). There will be more drought in our lifetime,” said Rushmore.

She stressed that it was more cost-effective to save water than depend on water desalination plants.

The city has signed multi-million rand two-year contracts with private companies to provide desalination services. Residents are paying the price as water tariffs have been increased and penalties introduced.

“We have to hit people in the pocket There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the way the city is run. People are angry about higher tariffs,” said Rushmore.

“But we live in a scarce resource generation... and people can use less water.”

Hackathon participants were also told about the city’s other challenges in a bid to source solutions from them. This included the city’s R1.7bn loss due to water leaks and infrastructure that needs upgrading.

ERushmore said the city has 11 000km of water pipelines and 9 500 sewage pipes.

“We get up to 1 000 calls a day to fix leaks. Our call centre can only take so many calls. Our staff can’t get to all of the leaks all the time,” she said.

“The city has 650 000 service connections (where water is bought from the city). Pipe replacement is a problem.”

The Western Cape’s agriculture and retail sectors have been another front where water-saving needed implementing.

Earlier this year when the agriculture sector used less water the city was able to push back Day Zero.

Claire Pengelly, who focuses on business solutions at GreenCape, told participants about efforts that various businesses have recently made to decrease reliance on the city’s municipal water supply.

“Since the start of this year all businesses should have cut their municipal water use by 45% and find alternative water supplies. There’s a lot of pressure on companies,” said Pengelly.

“Office, retails, malls use 11% of the municipal water supply and business see the water crisis as a threat. They can change their behaviour, use efficient processes, technologies, re-use water and look at alternate water supply.”

A more common intervention has been to save water from air conditioners.

Some businesses have installed smart meters at various water points that can identify leaks and monitor where most of the water is used.

Rain water harvesting was another common alternative for malls.

“They can use this water in toilets for flushing instead of clean drinking water from the municipality,” said Pengelly.

Neil Hoorn, open data project manager at the City of Cape Town, showed participants where they could access public information about the city’s water sources.

Hundreds of data sheets are available on the city’s website.

Weekend Argus