‘Day Zero’ sounds like the name of a movie that would absolutely involve Tom Cruise in a car chase, probably trying to get away from zombies (or aliens, or the government). Unfortunately for everyone, the real day zero involves the sort of danger that can’t be switched off when you feel like watching a rom-com instead.
Day zero is the name given to the day that a place totally runs out of water, and it’s approaching some Australian towns fast. This morning, the New South Wales towns of Dubbo, Cobar, Narromine and Nyngan woke to the news that they could run completely dry by as early as November. They join Warwick and Stanthorpe in Queensland who have been given a similar deadline.
It’s not just rural towns either. Warragamba Dam could dry up as quickly as October next year, leaving Sydney without water, and people living on the edges of Darwin are already seeing some people run out.
So what happens when day zero arrives?
The situation is particularly dire in Stanthorpe. If rain hasn’t started to fall by the end of Spring, the council will have to resort to trucking in bottled water. Their best guess is that they will have to bring 45 truckloads of water in per day just to keep the town alive, which would cost up to $2 million every month. The Queensland Government won’t say whether or not they’ll chip in for the costs.
Even though there are so many places teetering on the edge of losing their access to water, we haven’t seen anywhere officially cross that line. For a town to hit day zero is uncharted territory in a lot of ways, and ultimately we don’t know exactly what would happen. Like Stanthorpe though, we know it would involve bringing water in from outside the community (and taking water away from wherever it came from) at a massive cost to the town.
The fact that Australia is in the middle of the worst drought that anybody can remember is not new information. We began 2019 by breaking the record for the hottest ever start to a year, and the winter we’ve just had was a warm, dry nightmare. For years it feels like we’ve been speaking about smashing temperature records and then immediately forgetting about them before we move on to the next one. And now here we are.
Broken temperature records aren’t just lines on a graph or a filled out box on a spreadsheet, and climate change isn’t something to be ignored. Just this year we’ve seen massive bushfires across New South Wales, Cyclones Trevor and Veronica causing damage through northern Australia, and storms resulting in disaster level flooding all across Western Australia. That’s on top of the drought.
When we break these temperature records, they aren’t just something that a newsreader is using to fill up time. They’re real warnings that come with real consequences. For some parts of Australia, those consequences are cyclones and floods, but for other parts it’s the exact opposite problem. Australia is running dangerously low on water, and the reality of our towns hitting day zero is looking more and more likely to be a ‘when’, not an ‘if’.