Mexico City may be just months away from running of out water | CNN
www.cnn.com
The metropolis of nearly 22 million people is facing a severe water crisis as a tangle of problems — including geography and leaks — are compounded by climate change.

Alejandro Gomez has been without proper running water for more than three months. Sometimes it comes on for an hour or two, but only a small trickle, barely enough to fill a couple of buckets. Then nothing for many days.

Gomez, who lives in Mexico City’s Tlalpan district, doesn’t have a big storage tank so can’t get water truck deliveries — there’s simply nowhere to store it. Instead, he and his family eke out what they can buy and store.

When they wash themselves, they capture the runoff to flush the toilet. It’s hard, he told CNN. “We need water, it’s essential for everything.”

Water shortages are not uncommon in this neighborhood, but this time feels different, Gomez said. “Right now, we are getting this hot weather. It’s even worse, things are more complicated.”

  • Mr_Smiley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago

    As someone who until reading this was almost totally ignorant about the status quo in Mexico City (other than secondary school lessons in 90s on the 1985 earth quake) I am aghast at their situation. Those poor people.

  • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    9 months ago

    Not trying to be rude but there’s no way to say this without it being.

    Next time don’t build your capital city in the water supply. Next to the lake tends to work a lot better

    • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      32·
      9 months ago

      Not sure if you’re aware of the city’s colonial history. An example from the article:

      The Aztecs chose this spot to build their city of Tenochtitlan in 1325, when it was a series of lakes. They built on an island, expanding the city outwards, constructing networks of canals and bridges to work with the water.

      But when the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century, they tore down much of the city, drained the lakebed, filled in canals and ripped out forests. They saw “water as an enemy to overcome for the city to thrive,” said Jose Alfredo Ramirez, an architect and co-director of Groundlab, a design and policy research organization.

      Their decision paved the way for many of Mexico City’s modern problems. Wetlands and rivers have been replaced with concrete and asphalt. In the rainy season, it floods. In the dry season, it’s parched.

      • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        That’s all true, but that was hundreds of years ago. Corruption, mismanagement and climate change are the drivers now.

        Ultimately the commentor’s comment regarding “don’t build your city” also applies to the Spanish who did…all that building.

      • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        So you’re saying they decided to build their capital city in the water supply instead of next to it? That they had the opportunity to not drain the lake but they did?

          • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            “They” is the people who drained the lake!

            All I said is don’t make your city in the middle of the lake. It was half a joke anyway. I know they can’t just fix it now.

            • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
              10·
              9 months ago

              Your statement is coming off bad because of the context.

              The initial civilization built their civilization in the lake because it was a good idea. They kept the water in the lake and built giant floating farms to feed the population. If this had been maintained to the scale it was under the Aztecs, we would likely regards modern Mexico City as the premier canal City in the world.

              The Spanish colonizers drained the lake because they didn’t understand the system and chose to remake the area in the image of their homeland as much as possible.

              We are now dealing with a post colonial nation that has significant infrastructure built in the area.

        • bobs_monkey@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          Yeah, their ancestors fucked up 4-500 years ago. You can blame them all day long, rightfully so, but it does nothing to help remediate the current situation. It’s like you’re trying to place blame on the city’s current leadership, what exactly do you propose be done?

          • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            I never said it has anything to do with current leadership. I said their ancestors shouldn’t have made it on a lake. It’s not like they would have known millions of people would be living there. It’s was a halfhearted joke to warn potential city builders to not build a city in the middle of the lake.

      • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I can’t tell if you’re joking.

        “According to legend, they were told by one of their gods to settle where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus, eating a snake. After a hundred years of wandering, they finally found this sign. They saw the eagle, the cactus, and the snake on a small reed-covered island in the shallow waters of Lake Texcoco.”

        • Muyal_Hix@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          First of all, pretty much all of the indigenous city is gone. All of the bulidings are from colonial or posterior times. And second, cities are built on water all the time (Vence, Suzhou, Amsterdam) And they managed to subsit just fine. The problem came when all the infrastructure used by the natives was destroyed and the solution used was to drain the lake, which has only led to a massive ammount of problems.