De Vries told Daily Maverick Chronicle that if Cape Town were to run out of water, it would represent a highly visible municipal failure within a major developed, global city, which he believed was unprecedented. Mayor De Lille herself had said a well-run city does not run out of water, he said. Yet, he added, in his view current indications were that augmentation projects would not provide the required yield in time.

The face of climate change seems to be less of a slow march to higher sea levels and more of an increase in erratic and unprecedented weather patterns. What city today has 1000 year risk planning horizons?

Perhaps one of the only positives to come out of this will be that (hopefully) no-one will be able to look at water the same way again and start to think about resilience more directly.