How One of the Wettest Cities On The Planet Ran Out of Water
A combination of poor planning, global climate change, and urbanization have left the city of Chennai with too little water and too much water.
The 6th largest city in India, Chennai gets about 55 inches (140cm) of rain per year. That’s twice (2x) the amount that London gets and four times (4x) the level of Los Angeles. Yet it has been in headlines for being one of the first major cities in the world to run out of water. This year was its wettest January in decades, but still, the city requires trucking 10 million liters of drinkable/clean water a day to hydrate its population.
Chennai is the epitome of what can go wrong when urbanization and extreme weather couple together in socioeconomic industrialization to build over its flood plain to satisfy growth and supply-demand for new homes and offices.
The city relies on massive desalination plants and water piped in from hundreds of kilometers away because most of its water bodies are too polluted. Chennai is in fact intersected by three main rivers, all heavily polluted, that drain into the Bay of Bengal.
Porur Lake in Chennai completely dry in 2019. The city receives 90% of its rainfall in the northeast monsoon in November and December.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
So what is the source of the problem at hand? Why the heavily polluted waters? How has climate change impacted the city, if at all? The truth is, it all comes down to the lack of planning. During the construction of the city’s famous IT corridor in 2008, they built on top of and over 75+ square miles of marshland. Naturally (or perhaps not so naturally) floodplains, lakes, and ponds, all disappeared. It is predicted that by 2030 more than 50% of the groundwater will be critically degraded.
Residents fill pots from a water truck in July 4 of 2019, when Chennai became one of the first major cities in the world to run out of water.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
In 2015, a northeast monsoon dumped 19.5 inches of rain on the city in one day killing more than 400 people in the state and evacuating 1.8 million more out of their homes due to the flooding that reached the second floor of some buildings. A short 4 years later, Chennai’s water shortage was in the headlines. All its main reservoirs ran dry, leaving no choice but for the government to transport drinking water into the city to prevent its citizens from dying of dehydration. There were hours-long lines to fill containers, tankers were hijacked, and there was violence throughout the city.
Chennai, formerly called Madras, is just one example of a larger problem that exists globally, especially in large cities around the world that face increasing populations. Beijing, Sao Paulo, Cairo, and Jakarta are among the metropolitan cities that face severe water shortages.
Water tank operators refill vehicles at a government-run station in Chennai in July of 2019, after all the city’s main reservoirs dried out.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
“We need to work together to ensure that we have a water-secure future.”
Governments are pursuing approaches such as an initiative called City of 1,000 Tanks, they plan to restore temple tanks and build hundreds of new ones with green slopes to absorb and filter heavy rains and feeding them into storage tanks for use during drought-like months. This is a technique also used in various Dutch cities. Meanwhile, cities such as Chennai and Beijing continue to add up to 250,000 people per year, making it an exponentially challenging race without the use of some advanced method of collecting fresh, potable, water.
See the Teva7 by Oxydus and our efforts in the fight for getting fresh, clean water to the world, one drop at a time.
Read more at Bloomberg.com
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