As Cape Town Runs Out of Water, Here's a Look at Parts of Mexico City That Have Been Without Water For a Year (buzzfeed.com)

In some places, taps have been dry for over a year. People bathe their children with bottled water. A group of women has taken over water distribution from the city authorities. The future feared by millions of people across the world has already arrived in Mexico City , BuzzFeed News reports. From the report: In certain areas, people say taps go dry for months. Angry civilians have blocked off highways and squared off with riot police, wresting control of water distribution from the government. "Crime affects us deeply but if you don't have water, you can't do anything," said Marisol Fierro, part of a group of women in charge of delivering water to neighbors. Across the ocean, authorities in South Africa talk about Day Zero, when Cape Town is set to run out of water and the city is forced to shut off its taps. It has made headlines around the world, as people watch on with bated breath. But here in Iztapalapa, a sprawling, drab Mexico City borough where nearly 2 million people live, that day has already arrived, offering a window into what the future may hold for millions of people when the taps run dry. Police officers are sometimes forced to guard water trucks, popular targets for kidnappers who sell their contents for hefty prices. In other cities, politicians might promise expanded broadband, better health care, or higher wages to win votes, but in Mexico City, mayoral hopefuls have made simple access to water central to their campaigns. Reserved and quiet, Emma Pantaleon seems an unlikely protagonist at the front lines of this daily battle. Pantaleon joins Fierro and other women -- housewives who juggle child-rearing, house chores, and part-time jobs -- gathering water requests from their neighbors, coordinating trucks' routes with local authorities, and riding along to ensure the operation runs smoothly.

On a recent morning, she sat in the passenger seat of a water tanker as it revved its motor up a hill, dwarfing the dilapidated single-room houses along its path. When the driver swerved left and stepped on the brake, Pantaleon leaped out. It was a scene straight out of Mad Max: Fury Road. Pantaleon, 41, walked over to the nearest cinder block house and called out to its owner. As soon as Catalina Cortez opened the door, the driver and a helper marched in, pulling the truck's hose straight up to a plastic water storage tank taking up a third of the patio.

Comments

Uh...uphill both ways?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Something doesn't add up here:

On average, each person in Mexico City uses up 320 liters of water per day; in Iztapalapa, that number goes down to 235. Macedo, who says she watches the news all day and has several family members in the US, including some DREAMers, is acutely aware of the injustice.

My country uses uses about 90 liters of water per citizen per day. So basically, in the place in question, they're using 2.6 times as much water as we do. And we happen to pay around $4 USD per cubic meter (despite having no shortage of it and being upstream from all our neigbours), yet they (in a subtropical region) insist on "[delivering] water ... free of charge". I think I may see a problem here...

Re:Uh...uphill both ways?

[PPH]

in Iztapalapa, that number goes down to 235

And it's being delivered by trucks. So it means that they have the water (somewhere). It's just their distribution system that has broken down. I'm guessing that the truck solution is less economical than decent pipes. They just can't float the necessary financing in one chunk without the funds disappearing into various pockets.

Time to send in the army, line up a few crooked politicians against a wall who are diverting maintenance funds and shoot them. Or if the army won't do it, maybe Sinaloa will.

Re:Uh...uphill both ways?

[gwolf]

Mexico City inhabitant here.
The water that is delivered to our city comes partly from underground deposits, but mostly from a river system ~400Km away. The problem with Iztapalapa and similar regions is that our city is sinking - We are actually built on top of a lake. Seismic movements, natural mud compaction, and related issues can lead to pipes getting crushed and water distribution being inefficient.
Of course, a point to be considered is that Iztapalapa was never planned - Most of it was quite hastily populated, following a series of crisis we had in the 1980s (countryside impoverishment, a big earthquake displacing many people from the center of our city). It is the poorest borough in the city, and rather than planification, it has slowly seen consolidation. So, many parts of it plainly never had any water pipes, because they never had an authorization for building.
Should be noted - Ours is not such a lost, third-world, depressed city as some points make it sound like. It is a very depressed region, in a relatively rich and lively (and _huge_) city.

Re:So trump was right?

[HornWumpus]

_Everybody_ knows they're shitholes, not even in dispute. Politicians are supposed to be more diplomatic.

Re:So trump was right?

[bobbutts]

Additionally insulting was that many of the countries are shitholes directly because of previous US policy and action.

Re: News for nerds

[iggymanz]

Actually they get plenty of water, rains in buckets, but being it's a third world shithole they don't store it.

No water shortage

[manu0601]

It there is a truck full of water, that means there is no water shortage, but rather a problem with water distribution network

The pipes needs to be maintained. One common problem when private companies are in charge is that they take the money to make profits and forget to maintain the network. Is that what happened in Mexico City?

Re:No water shortage

[_Sharp'r_]

No, the Federal government is in charge of regulating and managing water and the municipal government is in charge of distributing water. So this is normal self-serving corrupt government bureaucrats and politicians, as usual. If they had private companies in charge of it, the water would actually get delivered. It's not the government supplying the clean bottled water which keeps many of these affected people alive.

Re:No water shortage

[gwolf]

Just the opposite. The issue with Iztapalapa is the region got inhabited with no planning nor authorization following a series of crises in the 1980s; there was never planning for two million people to go live in that borough, that 30 years ago was still mostly agricultural. Water pipes weren't laid before people built their houses (in some places, they haven't been set up as of yet).
Our local government has a quite decent, given the comparison, infrastructure system in most of the city. I live in a middle-class neighborhood, and have no problems drinking tap water; we have had some shortages in the last few years, but the situation is absolutely different from Iztapalapa's.
Cities that have turned the water distribution to private companies are in a much, much worse mess. Bringing the water to people should not follow economic incentives. It should basically just follow the needs of the population.
Yes, Iztapalapa badly needs their water distribution system to be set up. And then, fixed where it exists and is broken. But we don't need private companies managing it.

Re:So trump was right?

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said any such thing in public. He allegedly said it behind closed doors while trying to hammer out a compromise that would save the DACA people from possible deportation. Unfortunately Dick Durbin (D) decided it would be better to throw a hand grenade into the talks to score some political points for his party.

Re:Really Makes You Think

[gl4ss]

they don't want to pay for it.

really the news isn't about water running out, it's about their infrastructure failing.

due to corruption and not getting along mostly.

I can't drink tap water where I live now, but in my native country sure, yeah. the reason is that the locals don't bother with making the water delivery network good enough because this is cheaper. of course then they have to truck around shitloads of drinking water...

Re: News for nerds

[buchanmilne]

Cumulative rainfall in Cape Town for the past 3 years (2015, 2016, 2017) is below the 20th percentile of the past 40 years, see http://www.csag.uct.ac.za/curr...

As a result, the dams haven't been able to recover during the winter as they usually do, you can explore the details here: http://niwis.dws.gov.za/niwis2...

The national government (run by the ANC which is largely seen to be corrupt, including the Dept of Water and Sanitatiom which over-spends their budget and has high levels of irregulat expenditure) has however not been cooperative with the provincial government and City of Caoe Town (both run by the DA, which has been highly critical of the corruption in the ANC).

National government has built desalination plants in ANC-run cities that are less affected by the drought (e.g. Richard's Bay), but in Cape Town, the city has even had to foot the bill for the only major dam to be constructed in the Western Cape in the past 20 years (the Berg River dam).

Re:Mismatch in rainfall

[Hognoxious]

The article claims 16-21' of rain/year and other sources I googled indicated 12 inches.

Their legacy remains, hewn into the living rock ... of stonehenge.