So ever since I've been on the island, I've had this strange fascination with the white rooftops of Bermuda. Last week, when I was in a taxi on the way to Bermuda Airport (to fly home for Thanksgiving), I found out.
The white colour makes sense for cooling purposes. It reflect a lot of the sunlight, and helps keep the stone/concrete buildings cool.
But the more interesting question was why they are so pristinely white. Observe the picture above. Every house has the same clean, white, stepped, pyramid-shaped roof. Well it turns out these roofs stay white because that wash them regularly. Why do they wash them regularly?
Because they drink the water that runs off their roofs.
Yes, almost every house in Bermuda has a cistern underneath it, that fills up as the rain falls. (And man, does it ever rain sometimes - ruined the laptop of one of the Consultants it rained so hard...soaked right through his nylon bag). So all the roofs are made of limestone, which apparently has some sort of natural water filtration properties. The regular house-building process is apparently that you use the stone that you dig up to make your roof.
So it rains and these tanks fill up, and you use this water to flush your toilets, to shower, and yes...to drink. I naively asked the cab driver what happens if a bird/animal defecates on your roof, to which he responded, "yeah, you'll probably eat a little poop sometimes". But apparently these cisterns are so big that any poo you consume would be incredibly dilute. In fact, apparently these cisterns are large enough for a person to fit inside - you need to go down there every 5 years or so to scrub it out. There is a concrete divider inside each cistern so you can fill up one side and go inside the other to scrub. Then you pump the water to the other side and repeat.
Lastly, the roofs are stepped so that the water runs down them more slowly, allowing the cisterns to collect more water instead of having it run straight off.
Cool eh?
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