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Ok, so for those that don't live in Taiwan and that don't understand the local watery supply issues, here's a short primer.
Taiwan is an island, not a particularly big one, nor tiny. That said, Taiwan relies entirely on man made reservoirs for the water supply, as there are very few natural lakes due to the geography of Taiwan.
The highest mountain in Taiwan is nearly 4,000m high, with the central and eastern parts of Taiwan mainly being highly elevated mountain terrain. This has the effect that the rainfall is quickly washed out into the ocean.
As such, the government has built a range of reservoirs over the years to try and prevent the rainwater from rushing out into the ocean straight away.
Unfortunately some of these reservoirs have been filling up with silt and other sediment due to illegal construction, as well as dumping of unwanted materials and obviously some natural deposits. This has lead to the actual volume of several reservoirs to be lowered quite significantly.
On top of this, there were almost no typhoons hitting Taiwan last year, which is a big source of freshwater. This past winter and spring has also been unusually dry.
As such, there has been a water shortage in the central and southern parts of Taiwan since late last year.
It doesn't help that people are clueless when it come to water conservation here (dumb example, our ex neighbours had a sprinkler system in their 15-ish square meter garden, that was running on a timer, so even if it was pissing down, it would kick in) and that the water pipes are old and leaky, partially thanks to constant quakes hitting the island.
There's no shortage of water in the northern part of the island, as yet though, but there are also very few chip fabs up here.
It should be noted that water shortages happen every few years in Taiwan, so this is nothing really new. The government is also looking at building more reservoirs.
Note that Taiwan does have reverse osmosis facilities for purifying seawater, but as pointed out, these are not free to operate.
Anyone interested in seeing the current water levels in the various reservoirs can have a look here.
Water Resources Agency,MOEA
eng.wra.gov.tw
An additional note is that at least TSMC claim that they recycle most of their water they use for chip production, although I guess some of it is being lost somewhere, so they have to add some more into the system at some point.
Neat
Snow levels here
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio | Daily Snow and Sea Ice Temperature over North America
This animation shows the global advance and retreat of daily snow cover along with daily sea ice surface temperature over North America from September 2002 through May 2003. The snow cover was measured by the MODIS instrument on the Terra satellite, while the sea ice surface temperature was...
svs.gsfc.nasa.gov