Chainsaws, Women, and the Cape Town Drought
Unsung Science
CBS News
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2018, following a historic three-year drought, the water sources in Cape Town, South Africa ran dry. It was the first major city to face Day Zero: when you’d turn on the faucet—and nothing would come out.
The town leaders discussed expensive, environmentally disruptive projects like pipelines and desalination plants. But then an environmental nonprofit, the Nature Conservancy, proposed a radically different approach that could win Cape Town 13 billion gallons of water a year, cheaply and perpetually, using a method that worked with nature instead of against it. All they needed was a helicopter, some ropes and saws, and some of the poorest women in Cape Town.
Guests: Louise Stafford, Director of Source Water Protection in South Africa, The Nature Conservancy. Thandeka Mayiji-Rafu and Asiphe Cetywayo, Greater Cape Town Water Fund tree-cutting contractors.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2018, the drought in Cape Town, South Africa was so bad that nothing but muddy water came |
| 0:08.4 | out of the city's faucets. |
| 0:10.1 | The residents would go and collect their daily supply of seven gallons of water every day, |
| 0:17.0 | seven gallons of water per person per day. |
| 0:19.7 | So the scientists at a non-profit proposed a solution that worked with nature instead |
| 0:24.2 | of against it. |
| 0:25.3 | All they needed was a helicopter and an army of women with chain saws. |
| 0:30.3 | Those areas are very mountainous. |
| 0:32.8 | They are very high in Thai areas. |
| 0:36.6 | And here's the crazy thing, it worked. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm David Pogue and this is Unsung Science. |
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