Sopping wet little guilt trip

Anyone else feel like residents were being shamed and admonished for our failure to meet the City of Regina's request to reduce our water usage by one-half in the past 48 hours? That makes two of us. It seems like the media and the City's outlets were taking any opportunity to remind us we'd only reduced water usage by 18%.

Quick backgrounder: A component failure at the water treatment plant in Buffalo Pound, which supplies domestic water to Regina and area, occured early on Thursday morning. This shut down the plant, shifting service to limited resevoir water until the Buffalo Pound plant was due to come online sometime Friday.

The first notice I see of the warning about reducing water comes from the City of Regina's Twitter feed at 11:52AM. By that time, the vast majority of folks have already awoken, showered, perhaps set the dishwasher, completed some other activities, and are now at work. At work, I don't religiously check my personal Twitter feed, I don't read news sites, and I don't have the radio on. I'm sure this is typical for a lot of City of Regina residents - we're immersed in our work environment (please excuse the water pun). We're not going to get the message. Most of all, by 11:52AM, 50% of the day has gone by (and presumably 50% of the day's water used), so to reduce water usage by 50% for the eitre day, we - all of Regina and area - would have needed to completely stop consuming water after 12:00 noon. And I'm not even a math major.

To me, this seems like it's a failure in creating an effective communication plan, which, in part, is due to the shift in how we receive urgent news. If this is a critical matter that needs to be brought to the awareness of all residents, employing existing networks seems like a novel solution. Heard of text messaging? Establish an agreement with wireless carriers to quickly diseeminate emergency info via text message to subscribers within certain geographic areas. The majority of Canadians carry mobile phones these days. Rapid communications you can engage in urgent situations.

For the record, oh mighty City of Shamegina, once we found out, too little too late to be of much use, the boy and I tried to drop our domestic water use to minimal levels... On top of already having a low-flow toilet, high-efficiency washer, and other water-saving devices. I'm sure a lot of people who did know about it also tried their best. Stop shaming us, city officials. This was our first serious dress rehearsal at a water shortage.