Back in 2014 Cape Town was described as one of the world’s top “green” cities, and the Democratic Alliance — the opposition party that has controlled Cape Town since 2006 — took pride in its emphasis on sustainability and the environment.

The situation has turned to become the worst in 2018. Today, Cape Town faces two catastrophic, extinction-level botheration. First, the rains that once fell so reliably during the winter months have tailed off. For the past three years, they have barely fallen at all—a phenomenon one meteorologist calls a once-in-628-years weather event. Second, Cape Town is one of the more unequal cities on earth, with the wealthy, mostly white, population living in toney coastal and inland suburbs, and the poor, mostly black, inhabitants shunted onto the flatlands, an hours-long commute from the city’s economic hub.

'Day Zero', the day that taps in drought-hit Cape Town are forecast to run dry, which was supposed to happen someday in April has been pushed back to July 9, authorities in the South African city announced on Tuesday.

"The reduced consumption that continues to be sustained by Capetonians is the primary reason that we are able to celebrate this achievement this week," Mmusi Maimane, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance party, said in a statement.

This will mark the first time that a major modern city has run out of municipal water. In 2008, Barcelona came close. Sao Paulo, the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere, teeters on the brink. The government of Indonesia has given serious consideration to abandoning chunks of Jakarta, which is paradoxically sinking below sea level, drowning in torrential rains, and running out of potable water. What is now certain is that Cape Town will become a test case for what happens when climate change, extreme inequality, and partisan political dysfunction collide.

So how does an ostensibly well-run city manage to blow the water file so spectacularly? In part, it comes down to the fact that its administration was paralyzed by a sort of bureaucratic magical thinking that combined technocratic hyper-efficiency, an obsession with austerity-driven bean-counting, and an apparent belief that miracles are certain to fall from the sky.

Over the years, the Cape Town government has studiously ignored reams of data and studies readily available in the public domain. One of the first warnings that Cape Town would run dry was published in the Cape Times in 1990. Scientists, meteorologists, engineers and lay-folk have echoed those warnings in the years since. Emergency measures were considered and abandoned, with weather-like caprice: Desalination plants were deemed too expensive and cumbersome for a situation that the city’s bureaucrats believed would resolve itself. A fully completed plant in the nearby Mossel Bay municipality was mothballed in 2011; at slightly less than a dollar a kiloliter, the water it produced was deemed too expensive.

But the city made mistakes, too. Last year, instead of focusing on “low-hanging fruit” like tapping into local aquifers, the city concentrated on building temporary desalination units, said Kevin Winter, a water expert at the University of Cape Town’s Future Water Institute.

As Day Zero looms, some were stocking up on water at two natural springs in the city. Others were buying cases of water at Makro, a warehouse-style store.

In Constantia, a suburb with large houses on gated properties with pools, some residents were installing water tanks in their yards.

At one house, Leigh De Decker and Mark Bleloch said they had reduced their total water consumption from the city to 20 litres a day, down from 500 litres a day before the drought. Instead, they now draw from two 10,000-litre tanks of treated well water, and were waiting for two additional tanks to be delivered