Swiss engineering has a reputation for being precise and reliable.
And the country has a reputation for being... not paranoid, exactly,
but at least taking a lot of precautions about their safety.
Switzerland is the only country in the world
with enough nuclear fallout shelters for the entire population.
Even now, it's a legal requirement that any new build house here
must have a shelter if it's not close enough to an existing one.
And okay, a lot of those shelters are being used mostly for storage these days,
probably for cheese, but if the world takes a dark path?
Switzerland is ready.
And that extends to this.
The drinking water.
I'm in Zurich, the largest city in Switzerland,
and it has an entire backup water supply system.
The city has hundreds of drinking fountains, free for public use,
of all sorts of designs.
And okay, most of them are fed from the same pipes as homes and offices:
it's mostly filtered water from nearby Lake Zurich,
with a bit of spring water and ground water mixed in.
It is, of course, some of the safest drinking water in the world.
Because Switzerland.
But in the event of an emergency:
let's say the lake was contaminated somehow,
or there's a days-long power cut that shuts all the pumps down:
not that that's likely, because the electricity supply is just as secure,
but if it happens: Zurich is still prepared.
There is an entire backup water system,
fed by nothing more than gravity from a spring on a nearby mountain.
It runs through 150 kilometres of pipes to taps in hospitals and fallout shelters,
and special drinking fountains like this.
These can all be adapted so they can fill a lot of buckets
in a very short amount of time
with nothing more than some hoses and scaffolding.
This water isn't being wasted, by the way.
I mean, it is, no-one's drinking it,
but if it wasn't going through these pipes
it'd just be joining a river and heading straight to the ocean by a different path.
Lots of cities maintain some level of redundant water supply:
some backup pipes, or emergency tankers in case everything fails.
But Zurich?
They have two systems, constantly tested,
always running together.
Just in case the world ends.