Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1432934
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 NOVEMBER 2021 OPINION Raphael Vassallo 'Water, water everywhere…' and not a drop was saved IT is probably one of the most widely misquoted lines in the entire history of Western litera- ture… but here goes anyway: "Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink; Water, water everywhere…" Ah, but how does that line ac- tually continue, in the original 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Iron Maide… I mean, Samu- el Taylor Coleridge? Funnily enough, I remember that very question being asked in some TV quiz show or oth- er, way back when. And I also remember thinking: "Huh? That's a dead giveaway, isn't it? Doesn't absolutely EVERY- BODY know that it's: 'and not a drop to drink'…?" Well… it turns out I was wrong on two counts there. For starters, the correct line is actually: 'NOR ANY drop to drink'. (And what do know? Even Iron Maiden got it right …) On top of that, however, there were some other people in the room, at the time: including a certain relative whom some of you may remember from your University years. And, well, let's just say that my fa- ther would have easily won the 'million-dollar' prize for that particular question; while his son would have gone and made a spectacular fool of himself, right there on live TV (and would probably still be kick- ing himself for it now, all these years later)… In any case, however: even when misquoted, the funda- mental irony doesn't really change much. There the An- cient Mariner was, dying of thirst on a becalmed vessel ('as idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean'), surrounded on all sides by nothing but 'water, water everywhere', as far as the eye could see… and not a single drop of it could prove even re- motely useful, for the purpose of quenching his own thirst. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? In fact, you could al- most re-interpret the Ancient Mariner as a metaphor for the island of Malta (where, funnily enough, Coleridge himself had resided for a few years): sur- rounded, as it is, by 'water, wa- ter everywhere'… and likewise (then as now) facing a perma- nent 'crisis', precisely due to 'lack of water'... In Malta's case, however, the irony is considerably more… um… ironic. For the crisis we are now experiencing seems to involve an overabundance (as opposed to any 'lack') of that all-important substance; and unlike the seawater that was so poignantly useless to the Ancient Mariner: it is rainwa- ter that is now causing all our country's water problems… … when, by definition, rain- water is also precisely the kind of natural blessing that our country really needs the most, at this precise instant. Even today – that is, before any of the other, more dras- tic climate change predictions have come true – hardly a year goes by without Maltese farm- ers bemoaning the annual lack of rainfall. This same 'curse' is even in- voked as a justification to ex- tract more groundwater from the natural aquifer… little re- alizing, it seems, that the same aquifer can only ever be re- plenished by rainfall anyway – of which there will only ever be less and less, in future – so the more groundwater you extract today, the less (and saltier) you will be able to extract tomor- row… Besides: was it not 'rainfall' that a certain former Arch- bishop used to lead all those prayer meetings to ask God for, after practically every dry spell? (Speaking of which: can we all at least agree to stop do- ing that now, please? It's not like our prayers haven't been 'answered', you know…) And yet, when more rain sud- denly falls on Malta in a few hours, than in an entire month – and when, as shall be seen, a single day's rainfall corre- sponds to as much water as can be produced, through Reverse Osmosis, in an ENTIRE YEAR – somehow, we spectacular- ly fail to harvest even a single drop of it. Instead, we all sit back and watch, when all that precious rainwater – an average of 99mm, recorded across the is- lands just yesterday – simply gushes past us on its way to the sea… dragging with it almost everything in its path, too: in- cluding cars, rubble walls, de- bris, and (occasionally) even people… In other words: not only does this generous bounty of prayed- for, Heaven-sent rain fail to al- leviate any of Malta's inherent water problems, in any useful way … but it also causes more severe problems of its own, in the form of (increasingly vio- lent, it seems) flash-floods. And this, I need hardly add, only compounds the existing irony: for didn't we (or, more precisely, the European taxpay- er) only just spend €55 million on a much-vaunted 'storm-wa- ter relief project', specifically to 'alleviate the flash-flooding problem in Malta', once and for all…? But I've already raised that is- sue in an earlier article: so for now, I'll just let it get washed away with the rest of the junk… Another question that in- trigues me more, at this stage, is this: how much rainwater, exactly, did we all just witness being literally 'flushed down the drain'? That average figure of '99mm', for instance… what specific quantity of water does it really refer to, in cubic me- tres? I shall have to admit the cal- culation proved beyond my own capabilities, so I asked hy- drologist Dr Marco Cremona to work it out over the phone (which he did in a few min- utes). Given that the surface area of the Maltese islands is 316sq.km, and that 99mm fell (unevenly) over that surface in one day: the answer works out at roughly 29,300,000cb.m of water, all falling in the space of 24 hours. And to put that seemingly shapeless, formless quantity into some kind of perspective: Malta's current water needs are met through a combination of seawater desalination (Re- verse Osmosis, which comes at a high energy cost); and ex- traction from the water-table. (Note: with the exception of the few reservoirs that do exist; and also, a law on 'mandatory cisterns in new developments' that never seems to actually get enforced… there is no serious national effort to harvest rain- water on any significant scale). To be fair, the cost of Reverse Osmosis has been greatly re- duced thanks to recent invest- ments in new technology. In August 2018, Dr Manuel Sapi- ano, from the Energy and Wa- ter Agency, told the Europe- an Environment Agency that: "The energy needed to produce 1 cubic metre of freshwater from seawater will be reduced to 2.8 kilowatt hours. Ten years ago, that was close to 6 kilowatt hours." Now: I don't know wheth- er that target has indeed been reached, in the meantime… but let us, for argument's sake, stick with '2.8 kilowatt hours' as a rough estimate. And let us also add that - according to the most recent WSC statistics – Malta produced 31.2 million cubic metres of water through Reverse Osmosis in a single year (2015, to be precise). Give or take a couple of mil- lion cubic metres: this means that the amount of rainwater that flooded our islands in just one day – 25 November, 2021 – was roughly the same as we produce annually, at a signif-