Mexico City In Crisis Over Water

Mexico City is facing a dire water crisis, and it is getting worse by the day.

"Mexico City's population is growing and its water resources are shrinking," BNamericas reported. Government estimates say the city needs to invest around $590 million per year for at least 40 years to improve water infrastructure, according to the report.

The city of 22 million is already experiencing water shortages and relying on trucks to bring water to some neighborhoods, according to Juan Jose Santibanez, an environmental scientist.

In Iztapalapa, a borough in the city, "there are 1,000 trucks distributing water to two million people, which is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of those people," Santibanez  told the PBS News Hour

Locals are dissatisfied with the service because of the cost and because they do not receive as much water as they need, according to the report.

"Sometimes, it takes or up to five days after we request it. And sometimes we can’t buy other things, like diapers for the baby, because we have to pay for water," Sylvestre Fernandez, a local resident, told PBS.

Residents who cannot afford the service get their water from municipal taps, filling up containers to carry home with them.

The crisis is, in large part, a water infrastructure problem. The city loses around 1,000 liters of water per second to leaks. Forty percent of the available water is lost to leaks, according to Jose Cohen, director of a documentary film that covers water issues.

"And 60 percent of the water that we use comes from the aquifer, the one that is drying up," he told PBS.

Some say rainwater harvesting should be part of the solution. Enrique Lomnitz, an engineer and entrepreneur who returned to Mexico after studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), works to install contraptions to collect rainwater on homes. He says the city gets enough rainwater to meet much of people's needs, but there are political and financial obstacles to getting the installations on every home.

"I think if all of the buildings were harvesting rainwater, we’d be talking about at least something like 30 percent of the city’s water needs could be coming from rainwater harvesting," Lomnitz told PBS.

Ramon Aguirre, director of the Mexico City Water Department, disputes that number.

"It is less than 10 percent, and that is being generous. To build infrastructure to capture the water, store the water, purify the water, it’s just not financially viable," he told PBS. Aguirre said the department is focused on collecting rainwater along with leak repair, conservation, and increasing the reliance on recycled water.

"The problem? A price tag that is four times the amount of money he gets in his department," PBS reported. "So, for the foreseeable future, he expects to worry more about containing social unrest, dispatching more tanker and repair trucks, like he does today, than about the long-term problems that are literally sinking one of the world’s largest cities."

What will it take to improve the water problems in Mexico City?

"[Given] Mexico’s political instability and lack of singular governance over this natural utility, and it becomes crystal clear that this crisis may require political upheaval and popular unrest to force a realistic solution. Until then, Mexico City faces an unworkable conflict between limited water supply and unlimited demand," PBS reported in a separate piece.