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“Journalist on Water Beat Helped Cape Town Avoid ‘Day Zero’”
April 18, 2018 By Wilson Center Staff
Saya Pierce-Jones got a cactus for Valentine’s Day and she keeps a bottle of treated wastewater on her desk. These are the souvenirs Pierce-Jones has kept as the water reporter for Cape Town’s Smile 90.4 FM over the past year.
The station’s mix of music and news in English and Afrikaans reaches about 170,000 listeners in this city of nearly four million. Since the city’s drought-induced water crisis boiled over in early 2017, the station has become a leading source of water and drought information for local residents, and Pierce-Jones has become its leading voice on the issue.
Until last January, Pierce-Jones was working as a general assignment reporter at the station. That’s when she got an unsettling piece of news.
“I got an email from the city telling us about the consumption levels and the dam levels,” Pierce-Jones said in a recent interview at the station. “And when I worked out some of the numbers, it was really scary.”
Read more at PRI.
Photo credit: City Center, Cape Town, November 2017, courtesy of Gilbert Sopakuwa
Graphic credit: Provided by MPH@GW, the online MPH program from the George Washington University
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