our city is 5 million strong and 90 days away from running out of water supply.....?

Question

I want to write an article of how to conserve our water and send it to the Editor of our big nespaper as an idea to publish to help our city survive and stretch our main water source until it rains this winter.
If you have some ideas, please share them,
(like the 3 to 5 minute shower instead of 30 minutes under the tap!)
and please read the ones before you so we dont' have a bunch of repeat ideas.
Thanks!

Answer 1

1) Short showers
2) Shower every other day unless you get filthy
3) Don't water your lawn
4) Don't fill pools
5) Don't wash your car
6) Don't use the dishwasher
7) Save up dishes until you get one big pile to wash in one sinkfull
8) Wait until you have a big pile of clothes before you do laundry
9) Turn off your ice maker and only make what you need

Answer 2

Unfortunately, you will likely find that the hard part isn't finding good ideas, but getting people to actually *do* them. Quite likely, some of the more observant people in the city have already noticed the drought, and taken a lot of actions to help conserve water. Other people ware just clueless, and won't change until they're force to. And then you'll have a lot of people who *would* change, except they don't see how their little change will make a difference.

Your best bet is probably making up a list of "If everybody did *this* one thing, our water will last X number of days more.

Restraunts stop serving water except on request - find the number of restraunts, and how many gallons this might save. So this extends the supply by some amount.

Everybody cuts back to a 3-minute shower and uses a flow-limiter to restrict the water to 2 gallons/min for a total of 6 gallons. Figure out what a long shower without a limiter uses, figure 5 million showers a day, and that saves how many day's worth of water?

And so on...

Answer 3

This is all good and well... but the most likely cause that you are running out of water is not human consumption but agriculture. It is the farmers planting the wrong plants in the wrong climate zone who use up 80% of the water resources, at least in CA, and it is no different in the Midwest.