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Perspectives change, and that’ s just one of the reasons you need to keep an open mind. This whole management-speak gobbledygook of“ thinking outside the box”,“ bluesky thinking”, and – my favourite –“ win-win situation”... they’ re all just words, until they’ re backed up by action. So I was recently delighted to actually witness a bit of corporate blue-sky, out-the-box thinking that really did produce a win-win situation.
I drove into the city, pressed the button on the parking ticket dispenser at the Westin Cape Town, and proceeded to spiral down into the depths of the parking garage until I reached a level called“ Bed Rock”. And, strange as it might sound, that’ s actually where I was headed. Because this is where Cape Town’ s first privately owned desalination plant is.
The building in which The Westin Cape Town is situated is owned by Hospitality Property Fund( HPF), which also owns a few other properties close by – Protea Victoria Junction, Radisson Blu Waterfront, Southern Sun The Cullinan and Southern Sun Waterfront. The latter two, which will also benefit from the desalination plant, are managed by Tsogo Sun, which is a majority shareholder in HPF.
When the foundations were dug for The Westin in around the turn of the century, water started seeping in. It was clear, but brackish – not quite seawater, but also definitely not fresh. The sort of thing you find in river mouths or some estuaries. Well, they tried to contain it as best they could, and built the hotel above it. Of course, it still seeped in so they installed big pumps, and from the hotel’ s inception – even before – they have been pumping about a million litres of water into the sea every day.
And then, in 2017, we all got a bit of a wake-up call. Yup, global climate change is a reality, and there is a real possibility that Cape Town, that lovely city that always appears in lists of“ The Ten Cities you Must Visit Before you Die”, may well notch up a newsworthy world record: The first major city in the world to run out of water. If all goes well and everyone continues to scrimp and save and bath in a teacup, it can be avoided, but the margins will be tight. So we have all put our thinking caps on, and yes – clichés be damned- we’ re thinking outside the box.
In fact, it was already in 2016 when the first, now seemingly quite mild water restrictions, hit,
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