water

[ronboy]

Hi I've just heard about Texas. Apparently they only had rain twice since January and people and animals are in a bad way, it's a serious situation. What I wonder would be the situation in the UK, with our rapidly increasing population, reputedly headed for 70 million in the next 20 years. Perhaps we should be storing our water in tanks at home, as in Bermuda. Ronboy

[Sim G]

I once read that each country, due to it's land mass, only has a finite number of people it could support in food and water, should it be cut off from the rest of the world hypothetically....

Mainland UK's absolute maximum of self sustenance is just under 40 million.....

[Robin128]

Technology increases have made that figure outdated...We can make as much drinking water as we like, at a price...and is our Government still paying farmers not to grow???

[Chuck]

Some counries assume they have more than they actiually have. here some seriously iffy irrigation systems and drawing water from the water table is now resulting in sink holes....

Still common for water to be sourcced from the ground in rural areas and due to hewat here there are numerous wayside wells that run continuously..wasteful!

[Alpha1]

I worked for a few years on a Industrial water treatment plant.
A leak developed on a treated water main joint it was just a trickle. It was raised as a maintenance issue every week but they did not want to shut the main down they said any way its only a trickle not important.
One of the the operators put a empty milk bottle under it timed how long it took to fill then multiplied that number by the amount of hours it had been leaking then costed the price of the treated water that had gone down the drain and printed the results in the works magazine.
It was repaired as a matter of urgency.

[Dougan]

I'm not sure the UK has any water shortage problems yet - there were cars floating out of our work car park today :shock:

However I don't think it does any harm to keep 20 litres of bottled water per person at home in case domestic supply is interupted for a while.

Also it would not be too difficult to construct a rain water 'gravity filter' in your back yard - you just need the rights types of sand and gravel to use as filter media.....

[Blackstuff]

Buy a £10 1kg bag/pot of chlorine granules (containing calcium hypochorite, not sodium hypo . . ) and you can purify 10,000 gallons of water. If you fancy pushing the boat out get a Katadyn filter pump (£80ish) and providing there is any kind of water source nearby you can forget about water in an emergency