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September 29, 2008
Arrojo: Potable Water Plan 'Absurd'
Unfortunately, it is probably one of the things most associated with Mexico: don't drink the water.
One hears many different reasons cited for this. In the Yucatan, the water table is very near the surface, and lacking any percolation through a soil filter, contaminants get into it quite easily. In older colonial cities, the system for conducting both waste and water are old, and cracks in pipes are said to allow them to slosh into each other. Some say that pipes through the city are okay, but people do not maintain the pipes and water storage facilities in their buildings well enough to ensure that the water that arrives at their homes as potable can stay that way.
In any case, it is bad news for everyone living in Mexico that the water straight from the taps is deemed unfit for use. People cannot drink it, they cannot wash their vegetables in it, some do not put it in their bird baths, while others have to rotate their toothbrushes to an every-other-day cycle to make sure they are completely dry before being put into their mouths.
Neither of the workarounds is ideal. One can get water delivery, which requires being home at the right time a couple of days each week, arranging for it to be left with a neighbor who can pay for it (water services do not run accounts for customers; payment must be made upon receipt), or buying it at a store and lugging home the big 20 liter bottles. The other option is to buy a filter for the house. Those require monitoring to see when the filters need to be changed and a fair bit of faith that the filters are up to the task of removing all the nasty things in the water. Non-inline filters, like those mass-marketed devices with filters on top of plastic pitchers, might filter out contaminants just fine, but the containers might be made with bisphenol-a (BPA), a chemical that is causing some considerable fuss after studies emerged that suggest it is potentially carcinogenic.
For the 50% of the country living below the poverty line, neither solution is affordable, and they simply have to deal with drinking unsafe water. For many families, the combination of large households and high prices for bottled water would require budgeting 10% or more of their income for clean water. That puts it beyond the means of most Mexicans.
It would be far better for everyone, not to mention a great boon to the Ministry of Tourism, if the government could get the water cleaned up and drinkable straight from the tap. Many plans have been developed, debated and sometimes enacted to try and provide potable water to the people here, but the costs are high. In 2006, the director general of the National Water Commission, said that Mexico would need to pour around 30 billion pesos annually, for the next 25 years into water projects. That adds up to about USD $75 billion, and Mexico does not have that kind of money to waste.
That is why the criticism of Guadalajara's new plan to provide potable water to the city by Spanish expert Pedro Arrojo Agudo and its flimsy defense by the project's supervisor, Ricardo Robles Varela, is maddening. The problem is severe, the need for clean water is great, and it sounds like the solution being proffered by the state government will end up being a worthless waste of money that benefits only the plan's developers.
Megan Smith's article in this week's Guadalajara Reporter details Arrojo's review of the Arcediano dam project, which claims the water will end up costing USD $0.73-$0.83 per cubic meter to process and still will not be drinkable. The water of the Santiago River, which the Arcediano project will capture behind a curtain dam, is loaded with heavy metals, which Arrojo says cannot be treated in the single purification process that the project proposes. The high cost-per-cubic-meter estimates result from the water having to be pumped up 580 meters through pipes to a treatment plant. The article states that, "[Arrojo's] concerns echoed the key complaints from the Pan American Health Organization, which found high levels of toxins and heavy metals in the Santiago last year."
The state water commission's response is that they have sufficient studies to satisfy them that the treated water would be potable. Robles dismissed Arrojo's arguments as "uninformed." The article quotes him as saying, "It is important, when emitting an opinion, to know the particulars of the case. His problem is that he is from another culture." [emphasis mine]
What? Is he saying that an expert biologist that was awarded the Goldman Prize for Excellence in Protecting the Environment in 2003, does not understand because the science involved somehow differs between Spain and Mexico? Is he saying European standards for what constitutes potable water are different from those on this side of the Atlantic? Is he saying that a Spanish expert simply cannot understand that the local government can get away with foisting a big bureaucratic boondoggle on Mexicans with no penalties? I cannot think of any interpretation of Robles' comments that legitimately answer Arrojo's criticisms.
It sounds like Mexicans are going to have to foot the bill for yet another project that lines the pockets of individuals while providing no real results. When it is all said and done, nobody will be held accountable for the decision to spend millions of pesos for a phony solution to a dire problem. Everyone here just seems to accept such things with a shrug of the shoulders, and therefore nothing ever changes.
It is perhaps not entirely ironic that Megan's article appears in the paper directly below another announcing the reopening of the tunnel near our apartment on Avenida López Mateos. It was closed for the second time since its initial construction because the pipes installed the first time they had to tear it all apart and rebuild it all over again were still too small. Yes, this tunnel has been built, rebuilt and then rebuilt again because of incompetence. This last time took three months and cost MXN $30 million.
Yet, as the paper reports, "despite calls for heads to roll, no one in the previous state administration has been called to task to explain the original shoddy job."
...nor the subsequent shoddy work that had to be ripped out and replaced again.
Posted by crispy at September 29, 2008 02:11 PM