Rachel Carlson

And a financial one, right?

What does he mean by stolen?

When water is scarce, it's also profitable.

So cartels or groups will steal water from pipes and then sell them for a lot of money.

Other estimates say it's around 40%.

But either way, the distribution of who is actually getting water usually isn't equal.

Yeah, exactly.

That's something Erin brought up too, especially for a lot of less wealthy people in Cape Town and the surrounding areas.

They were already experiencing water scarcity for years before the drought and before water restrictions went into place.

There was one study published in the journal Nature a couple years ago, and it looked at all of this after the fact.

They used a model to estimate that the wealthiest households in Cape Town were using over 50 times more water than the lowest income houses they looked at.

But everyone had to cut down on their water use or risk being fined.

Even people who weren't using very much to begin with.

Exactly.

Cape Town city officials knew they were in big trouble when it came to water.

So they'd started building temporary desalination plants as an emergency measure to have more fresh water for people to use for drinking.

But what actually let the city avoid day zero... What happened was that it started to rain.

Wow.

Filippo called it a messianic rain.

And I mentioned that to Erin and she agreed.