Water Cut Off to 5 Million People in Mexico City

Water to 5 million of Mexico city’s residents will be cut off for 36 hours over Easter weekend due to record low water reserves.

• » See also: Glowing Bacteria Could Join Rats, Dogs, and Watercress in De-mining Agricultural Land
• » Get EcoWorldly by RSS or sign up by email.

Ancient maps of Mexico City show it sitting on lakes, surrounded by water. Since the last of those lakes were drained in the 1960’s, Mexico has faced problems of water shortages. These problems are compounded by two factors: a staggeringly large population of nearly 9 million and extremely poor quality water pipes.

It’s estimated that for every glass of water that comes out of a tap in Mexico city, the same amount ended up leaking out of the city’s pipes before it could reach the faucet. The problem of losing 50% of the city’s water to leaky pipes was compounded this year by last year’s unusually low rainfall. As a result, city reservoirs are more than half empty.

This is the third time this year that the government has been forced to resort to cutting its residents off from water. This water shut-off was intentionally planned to overlap with Easter weekend in the hopes that more families would have left the city for the holiday.

To aid those who did not leave the city, emergency water are being sent to areas of the city cut off from water in their homes.

Image credit: Usfirstgov via Wikipedia, under a Creative Commons license.

Via: BBC

Tweet This Post