I can't help but be troubled by the weekend's no result to using recycled water in the drinking water of Toowoomba. I'm still waiting to figure out what the fall out of this will be, and why exactly it happened. The yuck factor has been widely blamed for the outcome. But from my understanding, there wasn't really any other options available to a city this far down the drought track. It really was recycled water, or die, at least as far as the city is concerned.

There is plenty of cliche rhetoric which could go here, to point out how crazy it is to be so wasteful with water, but that isn't going to help the "where to now" question. Perhaps all water will be delivered in bottles, and the waterpipes will fall unused due to lack of supply. Considering there isn't any real watersaving infrastructure in place I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen, if only for a short time.

This same issue is going to crop up again and again all over Australia as we continue to dry out. In some ways I'm surprised that there even was a referendum on this issue. I would have expected, but not necessarily supported, the water board to just have done it, and kept the water quality up scratch.