Two Cape Town residents go to extremes to raise awareness about the drought

Two Capetonians ran for a gruelling 24 hours‚ finishing at the top of Lion’s Head on Friday morning‚ to highlight the water crisis in the Western Cape.

Kelvin Trautman‚ 34‚ and Heleen Mills‚ 30‚ stopped at Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille’s office on Thursday‚ 15km into their run‚ to speak about the city’s plans to tackle the water shortage.

Trautman said the idea came to him a week ago because he was shocked by people being unawareness of the severity of the crisis.

“It seemed as though no one was standing up and taking responsibility for it. We are in the grips of the worst drought since 1904. Heleen and I decided‚ because we have this massive water crisis and we have these new water restrictions‚ we’d use this run to put the spotlight on this. This run is meant to be a conversation starter‚” said Trautman‚ a documentary photographer.

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“With the new water restrictions we are only allowed to use 100 litres of water a day. It might sound a lot but it is remarkably little when you equate it to domestic water use. Your average washing machine uses 150 litres of water per wash cycle. A five-minute shower is the equivalent of 100 litres. We are trying to get people understand just how little 100 litres of water is and how serious the crisis is. The idea was to run 100 kilometres in 24 hours - parallel with the water restrictions - 100 litres in 24 hours”.

Trautman hopes people will start conserving water but said the impression he gets is they feel “disconnected from the problem” because they cannot see how low dam levels really are.

Mills‚ who works in digital marketing‚ said the highlight of the run was speaking to people along the way to encourage them to use water wisely.

“We started running on Thursday morning at Parliament and completed the run at Lion’s Head.

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“It is not going to be comfortable using 100 litres of water a day‚ it requires us to go beyond what is comfortable - but it is absolutely do-able and requires us to be very frugal with how we use it.”

The two said completing the 24-hour run is not the end of their road for their awareness campaign. Even if the rains come‚ it will not solve the water problem and people will have to continue with their conservation efforts.