Something to Chew On - Mexico Taps Out

It's funny how much good information can be gleaned from the London Review of Books. 

Cape Town resident, Rosa Lyster, has penned an essay about the fresh water crisis she first experienced in her own home town and that now besets many other cities, including Mexico City.

Lyster opens her narrative by addressing a common  social condition taking hold these days, an "aversion to being told the truth about a bad situation." I think most of us share this condition. Then she turned her attention to the plight in Mexico City.

A few years ago, I heard a scientist at a conference say that Mexico City was ‘drinking itself to death’, and while I have often thought of that description since then, I didn’t really understand what she meant. It’s difficult to picture an aquifer, even when it’s described as a ‘vast underground lake’. I went to Mexico City to understand how a city could be drinking itself to death. When I got there I wanted instead to be lied to, not to see the cathedral lowering itself into the ground and the sinkholes opening up in the street, the ankle-deep trickle where a river used to be, or the trucks toiling up a hillside to deliver water to neighbourhoods that haven’t had a regular supply in a decade. I didn’t want to have to stop myself crying when a man began a description of his childhood in Michoacán with the words, ‘I always thought that the rain was splendid,’ as if he was talking about something extinct.

...We were walking towards the last houses high up the hill, watching the water trucks make the almost vertical climb, and listening to the dogs barking and the brakes screeching. The women who live on the street were standing outside their gates, as they do every morning when the municipal water supply is unavailable or unreliable, which in Ecatepec is most mornings. On that street, nothing had come out of the taps in five months. The women were telling the drivers what to do with cheery impatience, nudging dogs away from children, buying bread from a man on a motorbike – coping, the way it’s said that women in places like that do.

As she brushed out her great-granddaughter’s hair, Yolanda said that sometimes the pipas didn’t bring enough water for the street, so she and some of the other women would bring the driver into the house and hold him there until SACMEX, the federal water operator, sent another truck. She pointed to the table where they sat him, not with a gun actually held to his head – no need, they all knew the gun was in the room – and gave him coffee and pastries while they waited for the second truck to arrive. Ulises mentioned this thing with the gun, which some people would describe as kidnapping, as we walked up the hill. I said something pathetic about adapting to difficult circumstances, getting used to things you’d never imagine you could get used to.

What the Future Holds.

In five years’ time, two-thirds of the world’s population is going to be living in a state of ‘water stress’, according to the UN. Either we won’t have enough or it will be dirty or we won’t be able to access it without difficulty. Thirty-three cities are currently suffering ‘extremely high’ water stress, according to the World Resources Institute, which is another way of saying that they are using most of the water they have. This will only get worse as the effects of climate change intensify. Rising temperatures will encourage the flourishing of bacteria and other pathogens. Rising sea levels will salinate freshwater sources, rendering them unusable. More drought means more hunger, but it also means more violence, according to the growing body of research that indicates an ‘overt’ correlation between acute water stress and violent conflict (recent studies have also pointed to the strong connection between resource depletion and violence against women).

More flooding means more damage to already compromised sanitation infrastructure, as well as contamination of the remaining supply. In ten years’ time, India will have half the water it needs, as will Zimbabwe, although in its case ten years is an optimistic timeframe, given the unwavering severity of the drought there. Forty per cent of Beijing’s water supply is currently too polluted to use, and Mexico City is draining its aquifers 50 per cent faster than they can be replenished.

In Mexico City, everywhere is a place where water used to be. Almost nothing remains of the five lakes the original city was built on, although the memory of water is there in the names of the streets and the highways that were once canals. Twenty-two million people need a lot of water, but the other reason the aquifer is draining is that 40 per cent of the water in the system is lost through leaks in earthquake-damaged pipes. As the city sinks deeper, it damages the pipes even more, compromising an already profoundly compromised system. The water in places like Ecatepec and Iztapalapa will get dirtier, and there will be less and less of it, which means more reliance on the pipas, and more situations where one person has the water and the other person has the gun. Of course this isn’t the only possible outcome. There are many people trying to ensure it doesn’t come to that. But most projections indicate that the Valley of Mexico aquifer will be entirely depleted within forty years, and there doesn’t seem to be the political will to address this situation.

I understand the powerful aversion to "being told the truth about a bad situation." There is so much going on today and there'll be more yet by this time next year or by the end of this decade. I understand overload. Just look at the stuff I write. Reading through these papers and articles leaves scars. But I know one thing - when an accident appears imminent, it does you no good to close your eyes or turn your head.