How do we get droughts?

We're being told by the Met office that we should steel ourselves for the worst drought in decades.

We're an island and we get a lot of rainfall. If you don't believe me go to Manchester. We have springs, rivers, streams, lakes, a solid (or liquid ) water table beneath us.

What exactly is going on when we're told we should be ready for the hosepipe bans again? Does anyone else feel it makes a bit of a mockery of our water system?

I'm hoping we have someone here with a vast knowledge on the subject, I've never been let down before.

Water is used to make Smirnoff Ice.

You and Otacon drink it in copious quantities, hence the water shortage.

Balderdash!

Everyone knows all Smirnoff is imported from Soviet Russia, and in Soviet Russia Smirnoff Ice drinks you.

I used to work for a very big water company



I should have paid more attention because i aint got the foggiest

Thanks for that

LOL.

I asked for that.

On a more serious note, I have often wondered the same myself. It never seems to be in force up here though and only affects the south. We are not short of rain as you say, and we are surrounded by water which can be treated in desalination plants although the process is expensive I think.

We shouldn't be short of it thats for sure.

Something to do with the reservoirs i think

When its hot they obviously lose water, when they start running out so they
obviously route the water to schools/hopitals whatever thats more needy

So suckers like us dont get to water the hyacynths

OT : AUNTIE VON !!

Mail me with your dates in July pweaaaase !!

Ends OT

I'd guess at it being something to do with the cost involved to clean the water. In the summer months, we will obviously have more evaporation due to increased heat so less water will be in the reservoirs thus less in the cleaning system and they can't go sucking water out of the sea because of all the things which would get sucked up with it

We don't have sufficient desalination facilities to convert seawater to potable water.
Our water pipe infrastructure is up to 150 years old and much of the water is simply leaking from holed pipes into the ground.
Rainfall in the SE is at 75% of normal annual amounts.
Underground reservoirs are also less full than usual, water takes a long time to seep through the rock into natural reservoirs.
We don't collect much of the rainfall into reservoirs, we don't have catchment areas for it.
We use 25 litres of water (per capita) per day more than an average European.

Most of these causes are something that we could do something about, I believe Thames Water are spending £500 million on replacing pipework.

Further issues include dense population centres in the southeast, ie higher than average water useage.
Inability to move water from the North to the South.

Stuff like that. IIRC the French own 70% of our water - so blame them.

Something else the French have screwed up. Big surprise

So its lack of foresight/investment in our water infrastructure that is at the heart of the problem? Glad to hear Thames Water is doing something about it, I hope the other water boards are following suit.

VIRII said:

Most of these causes are something that we could do something about, I believe Thames Water are spending £500 million on replacing pipework.

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[Old Man Mode]

Ahh great, that means more holes in the roads

[/Old Man Mode]

I don't think there's a lot that can be done though really As VIRII said, we can't convert seawater to tap water and even if they did try and do it, it would require an awful lot of heat to get rid of the salt as it can't be done by filtration so using more gas/coal which we don't have

Gilly said:

So its lack of foresight/investment in our water infrastructure that is at the heart of the problem?

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That and the fact that we seem to use more water than anyone else, partly we "use" more because of leaks but possibly also from bathing, watering gardens etc.

sounds about right Virii

One of the local pipes was leaking for, oooh, 2 years, and i'm not just talking about a little leak, but a large puddle even in the middle of summer.
I'm currently taking bets on how long a damaged pipe at the bottom of the highstreat will be leaking for, I say 6-9 months as it's not knee deep.

Part of the problem is, that as mentioned a lot of leakage is from very old pipes, and it costs a fortune to locate and replace all of the old pipework (a lot of it is very poorly documented).


Add to that things like people building on flood planes, so where water used to pool and have a chance to soak into the ground it's now being forced straight into streams/rivers/drainage pipes and you get the situation where even if we had the same rainfall as normal we would be getting less water into the reseviours than 50 years ago

Gilly said:

We're an island and we get a lot of rainfall...

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We do, but it's the wrong kind of rain apparently.

I know that the water main where I used to live was laid 150 years ago, now I can't think of much from 150 years ago that we still use every day.

Apparently we use 115l of water per person per day in the south east, I am not entirely sure what we are doing with it but I bet most of it leaks into the ground.

I think the problem we have is that demand for water has been rising steadily but theres been no increase in the number of resevoirs for a long time, we are still supplying based on 1970's demand.

Its interesting to note that much of Londons water comes from underground aquifers, and because of demand the city has been sinking as it all gets sucked out of the ground. Apparently for the same reason Mexico City has sunk several metres since 1900.

M0T said:

I think the problem we have is that demand for water has been rising steadily but theres been no increase in the number of resevoirs for a long time, we are still supplying based on 1970's demand.

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That's because most of the water companies are too busy raking in the profits and not actually improving their services for customers. Greed tbqh

Trigger said:

That's because most of the water companies are too busy raking in the profits and not actually improving their services for customers. Greed tbqh

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Exactly.

We used to have excess supply so they didn't really care if 25% of it leaked into the ground. Now the supply and demand are much closer together so they have to sort it out.

I'd bet that if they fixed all the leaking pipes demand would still be less than supply.

Gilly said:

So its lack of foresight/investment in our water infrastructure that is at the heart of the problem? Glad to hear Thames Water is doing something about it, I hope the other water boards are following suit.

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The other water boards don't really need to at the moment really though as the shortage that they are on about is really only going to affect the south east.

I don't think it's just the fault of the water board, we use far to much water, and a mixture of such a high density population and lack of water fall (see link above), both are huge contrbuting factors.

I don't think we can just blame the water boards for this one, for once!

Although it would be good if they all got together and built a pipeline to transport water from the north when they have enough to the south. It was put forward to someone who work for the water company (not sure which), but said it would cost a lot.