Priorities

What's more important - the supply of fresh potable water or the disposal of raw sewage? Its an odd question for me to ask, but I am beginning to wonder now, and there seems to be no better place to observe than Dubai.

Being a desert, there is no readily available fresh water source, nor is there a resource to dump sewage. So for its part, Dubai brews potable water by desalinating seawater at a huge cost. On the other hand, it struggles to get rid of sewage at most sites by storing it in tanks and getting trucks to clear it out every once in a while. These trucks queue up at the treatment plant for about 15 kilometers on either side, and are lucky to get more than one trip a day. This delay and frustration has led some truckers to quietly empty their payload into desert land in remote areas or to "accidentally" leave their valve slightly open, so that after the first 6 kilometers of remaining in queue to the mother ship, their tank is empty, allowing them to pull out of line and make another run for money.

Any decent city that claims to be as cosmopolitan and fast growing as Duabi would have thought of this right before they started driving foundation piles. A city like Dubai should have had utility tunnels running under the city for as deep as 30 meters by now. The fact that this does not exist is testified by the background stench that hangs in the air, especially when the atmosphere is cold. This now reinforces my statement - "Dubai is full of sh*t!"

To anyone thinking dreaming about something new, think this - would you rather be in a pristine desert with no water, or would you like to quench your thirst while wading in raw sewage?