Explaining water shortages to Saudis

On a recent training course with some delegates from Saudi Arabia, we were inevitably discussing the weather. The delegates were pleased to be escaping the 52 degrees Celsius temperatures of Riyadh and didn’t mind the English Summer rain. There had, in fact been some severe downpours and locaised flooding a few miles from the training venue. All of this was shortly after a hosepipe-ban had been introduced and official ‘water shortage’ is still in place that has also closed a long stretch of the Leeds Liverpool canal between Skipton and Wigan. Interesting to note that there is no water shortage in Riyadh, a city of 6 million people in the middle of the desert without a river. All the city’s water is pumped from a de-salination plant 400km away on the coast – amazing what an investment in infrastructure can achieve!