Well, we are heading out of Canada after only a too short sixteen days here. I absolutely love the place and can’t believe it has taken me so long to come visit… especially seeing I have been married to a Canadian for the last, how many years now?
But … Oh. My. God. I can’t get over how much water gets wasted here. Apparently Americans and Canadians use more water per capita than any other country in the world and from what I’ve seen so far, I can well believe it. We have seen council/province workers washing down the roads along the alpine passes and I mean literally washing down the walls of tunnels with a high pressure hoses even though they don’t look too grubby with soot or mud or anything, and also using water trucks at road works to wash down freshly laid asphalt, presumably to cool it down quicker… though I am not sure why, because given this weather surely it would cool down and harden soon enough of its own accord.
I haven’t seen a single toilet with a half flush option and depending on the cistern, they have 6L or 9L going down the gurgler every flush (and yep, the water goes in the opposite direction to the Southern Hemisphere). Many toilets I’ve seen have a ‘Flush and Hold Down Handle for 5 Seconds’ sign to make sure everything flushes away properly. It’s not that there isn’t enough water in the cistern to take away the waste, it’s just that the bowl is so large that there’s at least 2L or more sitting in the bowl so you need to hold down the handle to make sure all that swirls away first. Largest one I saw was at our hotel in Banff – the Banff International Hotel – actually had a cistern that had marked on it that it was a ‘3.5G pf /13L pf… yes, you read that right THIRTEEN LITRES PER FLUSH whereas in Australia most of our toilets are about 3L to 6L to flush!
I mean for crying out loud, I saw a sprinkler turned on in a campground, even though it had been raining half the day! Figure that one out?!?
One guy I spoke to about water, said recently it became financially viable for them to ship water to the Middle East by tanker, and bottle it over there, to sell Canadian mountain spring water in fricken Dubai or somewhere. They have so much water here they are literally shipping it overseas and have been sending it down by pipeline to California for donkeys years now. Which is fine, I guess – some entrepreneur/mogul is shipping it off somewhere to hopefully be used by people who appreciate it and need it, but it’s the waste that bugs me.
Taking the cake in the water wasting stakes, has to be the cabin we had at the Canyon Hot Springs near Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks. When we first got there I wanted to wash my hands and face so I ran the hot tap in the basin… no hot water. Checked the shower… no hot water… checked the kitchen sink… no hot water. Now, our accommodations weren’t exactly a backpackers hovel because I didn’t want to be sharing a room or a bed for the duration, so I was kinda at least expecting hot water!
Off to the Reception we went to inform them that we had no hot water… the message came back, ‘Oh, it’s okay. You just have to run it for about five minutes and the hot water will come up.’ O_o Five fucking minutes? I thought, surely you exaggerate, lady. So back in the cabin, I turned on the tap in the bathroom basin and waited. Went into the kitchen and boiled the kettle. Came back to the bathroom and checked the water – still cold. Pfaffed around making myself a cup of tea. Came back to the bathroom and checked the water – still cold! WTF. Went into the bedroom and sorted some things in my suitcase. Came back to the bathroom and checked the water – finally warming up. Yep… took about five minutes. Five minutes of a tap running on full bore to get to the hot water. Must have wasted about 80 plus litres of water, (if not more!), just to get the hot water running into the bathroom. Well, after that I decided to boil water to use in the basin and do dishes in, running the tap only to get the hot water ‘up’ to have showers and then making sure to shower one after the other so as not to have to wait for the heat again and not waste yet another bunch* of water every time someone wants to have a shower!
As an Australian who has recently lived through more than a decade of drought and has worked hard to get our entire household’s water consumption down to about 350L of water per day, with everyone having only three minute showers, and until a short while ago, having a bucket in the shower to collect the 6-7L of water before from the hot water came from the other end of the house so I could throw it out on my garden instead of going down the drain; I am absolutely appalled! Just because they have so much fresh water NOW surely doesn’t mean that attitudes towards use of fresh drinking water should be like this. :S
Oh and to put the icing on the cake… in down town Revelstoke was a huge banner hanging across the Main Street congratulating everyone for their water conservation efforts. *scoff*
(*everything in Canada comes in bunches… I’ve been trying to get used to it since we got here so I can fit in! 😛 )