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A comment on Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Caribbean's Drought.

Re:Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Carib... by ChuckMcM on Sunday November 27, 2016 @02:41AM (#13048211)
I always wonder about ideas like this. Desalination is a known solution and big boats full of fuel that can power desalination plants are a solved problem. In terms of under utilized infrastructure you could put tanks in shipping containers and use unused container craft to move the water from port to port. Hanjin has a bunch available for cheap at the moment.
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Re:Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Carib... by wila on Sunday November 27, 2016 @05:56PM (#13052113)
All drinking water from the tap in Curacao has been from a huge desalination plant for many years, see also [1]. There's a shortage of water alright, but not drinking water.

I don't know anything about this story, but when I just asked a friend who lives down there it was not known to him. When I showed him the article he said that it reads more like a first of April joke as anything serious.

For the record, it does not happen much, but it has been raining down there now for 2 whole days.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/feb/18...

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Re:Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Carib... by 7952 on Sunday November 27, 2016 @06:14AM (#13048661)
You need the destination to have a suitable container port, and a way of emptying a large number of containers into the water system quickly. If you want to use normal shipping it would probably be eaiser to just import and distribute bottled water.

A big bag would just need a pipeline to come ashore and could be more easily pumped than hundreds of shpping containers. Although the details of their plan seem sparse. Does the bag offload into a water mains system, and will it need treatment before use?

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Re:Suriname Will Tow a Giant Bag of Water to Fight the Carib... by Grazester on Sunday November 27, 2016 @09:41AM (#13049365)
With climate change Caribbean islands would eventually have to invest more into desalination plants. Some already have these plants but they are small scale and used to augment main sources of fresh water.
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