permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

The great drought

Plagues of ladybirds, a hastily drafted drought bill, shared baths and 
friendships forged over standpipes ... As the first water ban in a 
decade comes into force, Martin Wainwright remembers the long, hot 
summer of 1976, while Dominic Murphy offers 20 tips for saving water

Martin Wainwright
Wednesday May 17, 2006

Guardian

I was the newest reporter on the London Evening Standard when the rain 
last stopped falling in the summer of 1976. I was sent out at short 
notice to suggest ways of coping with the terrible lack of water. It was 
slightly desperate and lickety-spit since I was only two weeks out of 
Bradford and didn't know my Hampstead from my Holborn. But the combined 
gods of journalism and the weather (usually equally fickle) beamed down 
and the terrifying editor at the time, Charles Wintour, put the results 
on the front page.

The cutting is as yellow now as the grass in the parks was then, but the 
hints I cobbled together then may be helpful as much of Britain faces up 
to a second blitz of hazy blue days and nights of drifting barbecue 
smells and murmurs from sleep-outs on neighbouring balconies.

And they bring with them wonderful memories: it was so lovely being warm 
and languid all the time, if not very clean. The most popular 
T-shirt/car sticker/badge that summer was "Save Water, Bath With A 
Friend", and, uncomfortably unerotic as it tended to be, lots of us tried.

Women nipped about on mopeds in summer frocks instead of the usual 
leather clobber; sales of bikes and scooter below the 125cc limit - 
which allowed you unlimited travel if you had L-plates - went up by a 
quarter. Admiralty Arch became a favourite bikers' rendez-vous. In the 
way that a scent lingers, I can still feel my Honda 125 puttering away 
while waves of heat from the endless sunshine and exhausts bounced to 
and fro between those venerable curving walls.

My hasty recommendations in the paper started with sheltering in the 
cool lee of the Pru building in High Holborn, comparing it with Eliot's 
instruction in The Waste Land to "come in under the shadow of this red 
rock". The reference was so erudite that it led to the only asterisked 
footnote ever carried by a story on the Standard's front page. But it 
was great that the metaphor survived, because the beating heat between 
June and September gradually turned London's limited green patches into 
a thorny scrubpatch just like Eliot's. Even the rosebay willowherb died. 
And I can't nail the date, but there was a morning in July when all the 
birds on my street in Maida Vale finally threw in the towel and migrated 
to Berkhamsted or somewhere where there were still seeds and buds around.

You could water window boxes with dish-slop, though, and that was 
another tip: take a shower by standing under Selfridges' petunias, which 
were given a pretty upmarket daily dousing in water largely free from 
bits of crud and washing-up-liquid slick. But the best bet, which I've 
often used since on sticky days in London, was to fall back on the 
breezes generated by tube trains. Those long escalators on the 
Piccadilly line were a life-saver - up and down, up and down - until 
you'd cooled in the regular funnels of air that the trains push ahead as 
they zip along.

It seemed to begin in May, that drought, at the very start of the 
summer, but the Met Office people had been worried for months before. In 
fact the alarm bells had started going off in September 1975 after a dry 
but unmemorable summer. Subsequent records show that, actually, less 
rain fell in the largely forgotten drought of 1995 (73mm against 76mm in 
'76, appropriately), but the difference was that in the great drought of 
1976, the sun shone and shone and shone. The really big heat started on 
June 23 when a whole fortnight saw temperatures reach 32C across much of 
southern England. It blazed until almost September, defying the British 
rule of hot but dull, and that was the reason for the general sense of 
glee, however serious the experts kept telling us the situation was.

No one had ever seen so many ladybirds - a colleague remembers the sound 
they made when you walked on them - crunch, crunch, crunch! - and the 
absence of green on the ground was made up for in the air by apocalyptic 
swarms of aphids. This was odd if you were on a bike - open your mouth 
and you got an involuntary snack, part aphid, part undigested lettuce or 
dandelion in their tiny stomachs. It fitted with the exhilarating sense 
that plagues were being visited on us, but only lighthearted ones. Bath 
with a friend, eat aphids and, as the Times recommended, use last 
night's unemptied basin to shower on a flowerbed - while standing in a 
tight circle of dirty pots from supper and breakfast.

For children of the 60s, in particular, the bonus was that the weather 
only seemed to discomfort the right sort of victims. It was a nightmare 
for Saturday car-washers, for example - in 1976, a filthy vehicle was 
one of the marks of an Upright Citizen, endorsed by the Sun and the 
Daily Telegraph. While slightly batty-looking hosepipe patrol vans 
prowled the streets in Birmingham, some fitted with pipe-detectors that 
looked suspiciously like coathanger sculpture, real direct action was 
taken against golf clubs. A vigilante group of Surrey housewives, 
ostensibly the last people on any Che Guevaran recruitment list, forced 
their local club to turn off its sprinklers by sit-ins, harassing 
greenkeepers and night-time vigils, which were easy to organise on those 
sultry evenings. (It was the year for all-night parties; a group called 
the All Night Party contested local elections but unfortunately didn't 
win any.)

Back in the north, where I grew up, the standpipes made their 
appearance, one per 20 houses, but not for more than a month and 
(allowing for the pink effect of spectacles looking back 30 years) to an 
encouraging revival of friendships. It wasn't just women who gossiped in 
the queues for water: it was a community event.

On August 5 the drought bill was hurried through Parliament, and taps in 
south wales immediately went dry between 7pm and 8am. There were fires 
that couldn't be put out in parts of the New Forest, and some graphic 
subsidence cracks appeared in mansions round Little Venice on my way to 
work. But most people shrugged and got on with finding bricks to put in 
the lavatory cistern or measuring the bathwater to the five inches 
recommended by civil servants in Whitehall.

The media got into crisis mode, naturally, but we were never really 
tetchy: there was no hunt for Those Responsible, as one suspects there 
will be if things get really dry this time around. The sun had somehow 
got through Fleet Street's green eyeshades. More than £500m of failing 
crops and the threat to the Dartford Warbler had their share of 
headlines, but the real punch was in wild rumours such as an alleged 
secret consultation between department of the environment staff and (a) 
mad scientists who put ice seeds in clouds and (b) Aboriginal rainmakers 
in Australia. Rumours? Alleged? To everyone's joy, both stories turned 
out to be true.

It had to end, of course, and it is fair to say that by August we were 
beginning to get into that crotchety frame of mind which starts to 
affect Greek taverna-owners and travel reps at the end of the season. 
That is why there was cheering at Lord's cricket ground halfway through 
the month when rain - what is this stuff coming from the sky? - stopped 
play for a whole quarter of an hour.

The great instrument of climate change, though, never to be forgotten by 
those of us who were there, was Britain's very own Rainmaker, Denis 
Howell, who was finally appointed minister of drought co-ordination by 
Jim Callaghan under the hasty new Drought Act.

The feeling among political commentators was that he must have done 
something awful to have been handed this poisoned chalice, but it proved 
to be one of those mythical cups, like Zeus's, that never run dry. 
Howell threatened rationing until December, and Lo! The rains came. They 
continued for 10 days until Howell was nicknamed the "minister for 
floods". He was helped, of course, by that other great British invention 
for wrecking the weather, August bank holiday. It poured.
MW

How to save water this summer: Twenty tips for surviving the drought

Don't run taps to rinse washing up, clean your teeth, etc. It sounds 
obvious but a tap left running can use around five litres a minute. 
Multiply that by 60 million Britons and that's a lot of unnecessary 
water down the drain.

Keep a jug of water in the fridge rather than wait for the tap to run 
cold. Obvious, again, but can you really say you haven't done it?

When you're making a cup of tea only use the amount of water you need. 
Modern kettles don't need filling to the top, and many have measuring 
graphics on them, just in case you can't work it out for yourself.

Never leave a tap dripping - it can waste up to four litres a day. If 
the tap needs a new washer, it's easy to sort out. The washer will cost 
around 50p and replacing it is quite a simple DIY job, honest.

For those of you who wash your car use a sponge and bucket. A hosepipe 
is even more decadent than cleaning it in the first place.

The loo accounts for 30% to 40% of household water consumption, so it 
qualifies for three entries on our list. First off, do you really need 
to flush it every time you go? Ken Livingstone thinks not and last year 
suggested Londoners follow his lead. If it's good enough for Ken, we 
suggest you try it too.

Put a plastic container or "hippo" in the cistern, which restricts the 
amount of water used with each flush. Using an ordinary brick instead 
will save you the price of a hippo (£6.99 for three, from 01989 766667, 
hippo-the-watersaver.co.uk <http://www.hippo-the-watersaver.co.uk>), but 
the brick will slowly disintegrate over time, blocking up your water system.

Install a dual-flush loo - the nuclear option in the loo. It has short 
flushes for a pee, longer ones for everything else. You'll find 
dual-flush loos at most decent plumbers merchants.

Now to bathing: try to shower instead of having a bath. You will use 
two-thirds less water for a five-minute conventional shower - though 
power showers can actually use more water than a bath over a similar 
period. The really conscientious can have flow restrictors fitted on 
their shower. And as the plumber is already there, you might as well get 
them to install low-water-use spray taps while they're at it. For a 
selection of water-saving sanitary ware, try the Green Building Store 
(01484 854898, greenbuildingstore.co.uk 
<http://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk>).

In the garden, plant Mediterranean species such as lavenders, rosemary 
and cistus. Lots of typical English herbaceous varieties will withstand 
drought, too, providing you mulch the soil during summer . This means 
putting a layer of bark, grass cuttings, manure, even gravel on top of 
the soil to trap moisture in the earth, or at least slow down 
evaporation. For suitable plants, try Beth Chatto's nursery (01206 
822007, bethchatto.co.uk <http://www.bethchatto.co.uk>).

When the lawn goes brown, don't panic - just leave it be. It'll come 
back with the rain in the autumn. If that brown patch of earth really 
bothers you, you can always get rid of the lawn altogether.

If you've got a garden sprinkler, stop using it. A sprinkler will use 
1,200 litres per hour and 3.2 million people own one in this country - 
so if we all keep doing it, it's very bad news for the reservoirs.

Instead of using a hosepipe on the garden, collect water in a water 
butt. This is basically a plastic container that you attach to your 
downpipe from the guttering of the house. It's easily attached - you cut 
away a bit of the pipe and hey presto. They come in a range of shapes 
and sizes, with natty little galvanised versions for the smaller home. 
Most local authorities offer discounted butts from around £20. For a 
wider range, check out the online gardening site Crocus.co.uk 
<http://www.Crocus.co.uk>, or real greenies might enjoy the range of 
ex-industrial food barrels at the Centre for Alternative Technology 
(0845 330 4592, cat.org.uk).

Use "grey water" in the garden. This is old bath and washing-up water. A 
reasonable amount of detergent in the water is OK and recommended by 
many gardeners, but try to vary where you put the water so you don't get 
a build-up of detergent. Better still, use biodegradable soaps and 
cleaners, or filter the grey water you use - a bucket filled with straw 
does the job.

Rainwater "harvesting" is the posh version of a water butt. This is 
basically a large tank (the bigger the better) that collects rain from 
the house guttering and pumps it into the home, to be used for flushing 
the loo. The harvester is often buried in the garden but can be 
free-standing - providing you have a suitable place to conceal a 
2,000-litre plastic container. A recent eco development in Somerset has 
put the rainwater collectors above the back porch. Expect to pay from 
£2,000 for a system. Details of suppliers from the UK Rainwater 
Harvesting Association (www.ukrha.org). <http://www.ukrha.org>

Get a water meter fitted. Meters are often associated with higher water 
bills, but this is not so: figures suggest that having a meter also 
makes us more conscientious, and cuts average usage from around 160 
litres a day to 135. Smaller households could save money, too: a survey 
in the Severn Trent area found a metered, two-adult home might expect to 
cut £200 from a normal bill of £340. Installing it, meanwhile, is free 
and it gives you the comfort of knowing that you're paying only for what 
you use, and not subsidising that selfish bloke down the road with his 
sprinkler.

If you wait and use a full load for your washing machine or dishwasher 
you could save approximately 0.6 litres of water per person - half-load 
programmes use more than half the amount of water of a full load. Also, 
always buy AAA-rated appliances, that use water most efficiently 
-they're competitively priced so you shouldn't be out of pocket.

Install a grey-water system, and reuse water from the bath, shower and 
washing machine to flush the loo. Systems costs from around £1,100, 
installation from £1,500 upwards. Try Gramm Environmental (01892 506935; 
grammenvironmental.com <http://www.grammenvironmental.com>).

Hassle the water company. While water bills go through the roof, water 
companies continue to make profits and waste hundreds of thousands of 
litres through burst pipes and rotten Victorian mains. Thames Water 
loses about a third of the water it puts into the system. Its 2004/ 2005 
profits rose by 6.1%. Contact the watchdog Water Voice (0845 039 2837, 
watervoice.org.uk <http://www.watervoice.org.uk>).
DM