Toilet deadline means there’s a rush to flush

Published on 22/09/2012 00:00

It IS not your standard excuse for having to knock off early. Residents of a Zimbabwean city now have a new nightly deadline: the half-past seven toilet flush.

Bulawayo’s 1.5 million residents are being asked to pull their chains at exactly 7:30 pm to beat water rationing.

The “big flush” has been
ordered on the days that follow crippling water cuts in Zimbabwe’s second biggest – and certainly its driest – city in the arid south of the southern African country.

The hope is that if everyone flushes together there is less chance of sewer blockages and pipe bursts, the city council said yesterday.

Simela Dube, the city’s director of engineering, said: “We need to flush our toilets at the same time to push all the waste that will be just under the
surface, as residents would be using little water to flush toilets during water shedding hours.”