Saw this fantastic graph today and had to share it. This is Edmonton’s water usage (in Megalitres) during the gold medal men’s ice hockey game on February 28th, showing that Canadians can cause a Superbowl “Half-time Flush”. It’s what American infrastructure planners have nightmares about – huge fluctuations in water usage caused by the synchronized armies of fans watching TV together.
I read a blog suggesting that as many as 80% of Canadians were watching the game live – which makes me wonder if the other 20% of people were wandering around outside wondering where everyone was. It must have been a ghost town out there. I wouldn’t know – we had to be near the TV so the players could hear us. 
3 responses so far ↓
1 Kert Gartner // Mar 9, 2010 at 6:25 pm
OMG, that is perhaps the best graph I’ve ever seen
LOL! Love it 
2 Greg // Mar 12, 2010 at 8:12 am
*sigh* I hate when they choose axes like that.
The swing, while impressive, is only ~15% in either direction.
3 Jason // Mar 12, 2010 at 9:08 am
15% in either direction is 30% – a pretty significant variance! I don’t agree that they’re being deceitful with the axis – at a glance I admit it may look like almost no water is being used at all during the medal ceremony, while 320ML are still flowing through the system, but you’d still see strong ripples on a 0-500ML graph. (It would just be more difficult to read)
I wonder what percentage of water usage is even under direct human control? While everyone was watching the game, how much water use was attributable to maintenance and industrial processes? Boilers filling, industrial humidifiers, sprinkler systems, auto-flushing urinals, fountain top-ups, cooling towers, etc, etc. Admittedly it was a weekend, but it would be interesting to see typical slow-period minimum volumes to get a sense of how much the steady trickle accounts for. (Like, if they’d let the x axis go a little further into late night)
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