4/4/2023 0 Comments Age of water aztec![]() He says water managers must find a more balanced approach to the city's water supply to rely less on groundwater. ![]() candidate at Stanford, is studying Mexico City's water woes. The system moves rainwater and sewage out of the city quickly, but little is recycled or used to recharge the aquifer.Īnthropologist Dean Chahim, a Ph.D. It is not helping the city's water shortage or sinking problems. A major tunnel project launched almost a decade ago has been plagued with delays and enormous cost overruns, with a budget now topping $2 billion. Since last century, Mexico City has spent billions of dollars on flood control. The underground sewer line connected to her house now tilts upward and floods her patio, especially on rainy days. It's at least a foot lower than the other side. A large fissure in the ground runs right through her property, out the gate and down the street. "Just look at my patio - it's full of cracks," she says. Half of the street is lower than the other half, one of many signs this metropolis is sinking. But for those living in the poorer eastern stretches of the city, like 52-year-old Marco Marquez, it feels like now.Ī large crack cuts through this Mexico City street. When exactly that is, no one really knows. Sooner or later it will run out," he says. "We are depleting volumes of water that took hundreds, thousands of years to store. Today, Aguirre says, twice as much water is pumped out as is put back in. The rest comes from the valley's vast underground aquifer. Hundreds of miles of pipes now bring in about 30 percent of the city's water needs from faraway rivers and lakes. To make room for their expanding empire, over a few hundred years, they slowly but surely drained all the valley's lakes.īy the 20th century, long after Mexico's independence from Spain, the fresh surface water was mostly gone and the hunt for new sources had taken over. The "historic mistake" kicked in around the 1600s, when Hernándo Cortés and his band of conquerors arrived. The city flooded back then too, but the Aztecs, probably the last civilization to properly manage this watershed, built a system of dikes to control the problem. They built their city atop the huge lakes that filled this valley, leaving the natural freshwater supply intact around them. The ancient Aztecs first picked the spot. ![]() ![]() Goats and Soda For Karachi's Water Mafia, Stolen H2O Is A 'Lucrative Business' "It's a historic mistake the city has had to pay for more than 500 years," says Ramón Aguirre Díaz, who has run Mexico City's municipal water system for more than a decade. So why put a capital city more than 7,000 feet above sea level, in a mountain-ringed valley, that fills like a plugged-up bathtub when it rains? And as that water table drops, the city sinks. ![]() Nearly all that rainwater runs off the streets and highways into the city's massive drainage system built to stave off perennial flooding.ĭrinking water increasingly comes from a vast aquifer under the metropolis. The skies darken and then an amazing downpour ensues.ĭespite the rainfall, for five months of the year, many of the metropolitan area's more than 20 million residents don't have enough water to drink. Between May and September, on most late afternoons, thick clouds roll into Mexico City's mountain-ringed valley. All Things Considered is examining the forces at play in separating the haves from the have-nots - from natural disasters to crumbling infrastructure and corruption. It is among the many structures in the Mexican capital that are sinking.Īround the world, people are struggling for access to drinking water. The Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral in Zócalo Plaza has had to undergo repeated repairs. ![]()
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