One Step From Disaster

A year ago I was caught in the heat wave in the Suurveld. Walls were hot to the touch, and every item of furniture was hot, the wind was hot, even the shade was baking hot. Then the water supply failed. When it came on again, through a black PVC pipe, it was literally too hot to touch. There seemed to be no escape. OBSERVATION: South Africa has had a (not so) latent water crisis, since 2014, due to El Niño. But the crisis became critical in the extreme heat of last summer. Volunteers moved millions of litres of water to hundreds of thousands of people. If there had been one more failure -- my own observation -- the failure of fuel supplies in particular -- it could have been a disaster without equal. In fact earlier that same month, there were fuel shortages.