Icebergs could float to the rescue of Cape Town water crisis

[May 01, 2018]  By Tanisha Heiberg

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to tug icebergs from Antarctica to South Africa's drought-hit Cape Town to help solve the region's worst water shortage in a century.

Salvage master Nick Sloane told Reuters he was looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of liters of drinking water.

"We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet," said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger liner Costa Concordia in 2014.

South Africa has declared a national disaster over the drought that hit its southern and western regions after 2015 and 2016 turned into two of the driest years on record.

Tough water restrictions are already in place and Cape Town authorities have warned that taps could run dry altogether as soon as next year if winter rains do not come to the rescue of the port city's 4 million residents.

Cape Town-based Sloane said his team could wrap passing icebergs in fabric skirts to protect them and reduce evaporation. Large tankers could then guide the blocks into the Benguela Current that flows along the west coast of southern Africa.

A milling machine would then cut into the ice, producing a slurry and forming a saucer structure that will speed up the natural process, he said.

Adelie penguins stand atop a block of melting ice on a rocky shoreline at Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay, in East Antarctica, January 1, 2010. REUTERS/Pauline Askin/File Photo

A single iceberg "could produce about 150 million liters per day for about a year," around 30 percent of the city's needs, said Sloane, a director at the U.S. marine salvage firm Resolve Marine.

He said he was planning to hold a conference later this month to try and sell the $130 million project to city officials and investors. The city council was not immediately available for comment.

(Editing by Ed Stoddard and Andrew Heavens)

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