Gas cuts for starters, water cuts for main course

The energy situation is not depressing enough so let's talk about water

Twenty-three years ago my family and I moved into a new neighbourhood. At the time, it was on the outskirts of Sofia, a scarcely populated area with magnificent views to the Vitosha mountain. With just a dozen or so newbuilds, my parents decided it would be a good place to live. Sadly, what they didn’t foresee was that this dozen or so newbuilds were only the start.

Just three years later, that dozen had swelled to several dozen and counting, and the water outages began. Originally planned for a scarcely populated area, the local water pipe network was physically unable to match the new demand.

On top of that, the network was old and badly maintained, and the new private owner only decided to invest in pipe replacement when the situation really got out of control with pipes rupturing on an almost weekly basis and outages turning into a regular part of life.

Now, twenty-three years later, the neighbourhood is badly overbuilt and the network is once again giving indications it’s struggling to keep up with demand. While outages are not yet back, water pressure fluctuates depending on how many people in a residential block are using water at the same time.

We moved out of the city and into the country — into a drought-prone area as luck and ancestry would have it. Every summer, when people in the village begin filling their outdoor swimming pools water pressure plummets or entirely disappears. Every time they use tap water to water their plants, pressure plummets or disappears.

For variety’s sake, occasionally the water pumps break down and an outage ensues. This is just a local example of a global problem that is only about to get worse. A lot worse, if we are to believe forecasts.