Several major cities are now close enough to running out of water that officials have started planning for the day the taps are switched off, and the list is getting longer every year

By Kiran Journals – SpaceDaily

In a modern city, the tap works. Water comes out. Teeth get brushed, kettles boiled, faces washed, and none of it happens on any visible margin. The whole invisible machinery of pipes and reservoirs and pumps behind that one tap is treated by almost everyone as a settled feature of the world, the way we treat the ground being solid or the sun coming up in the east.

And then, in one city after another over the past few years, that machinery has quietly started to fail. Not all at once. Not everywhere. Not in a way that has made a single global headline the way a war or a stock market crash would. But steadily, in enough different places, and for reasons that are structural rather than one-off, that the phrase Day Zero has moved from being a term used only by climate researchers to being a planning category inside the offices of city governments.

And the list of cities on the watch list is getting longer.