100,000 Mexicans still without water
RIVERS IN SOUTHERN MEXICO POLLUTED AFTER THIEVES TAP OIL PIPELINE
Some 100,000 people remained without drinking water in southern Mexico on Wednesday after rivers were contaminated by an oil spill triggered when thieves tapped a pipeline.
Authorities reopened two out of four water filtration plants that had closed after the weekend spill, which initially left half a million people without clean water in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco state.
Municipal officials said the number of people without water dropped to 100,000, but the two other filtration facilities would not open until today because clean-up crews must remove more oil near the plants.
Schools were closed on Wednesday to prevent any health problems.
Thieves tapped an oil pipeline operated by state-run energy firm Pemex on Sunday, causing oil to gush into local rivers.
Lucrative activity
The Tabasco state government urged residents to ration water and estimated that it would take another 72 hours to completely clean up the mess.
Stealing oil has become a lucrative activity among drug cartels, forcing Pemex to stop shipping finished fuel through its pipelines after discovering 3,674 illegal taps last year.
The thefts have caused other environmental disasters in the past and a deadly explosion in December 2010, Authorities issued an alert for several Mexican states on Wednesday after thieves snatched potentially deadly radioactive material used for industrial radiography.
The iridium-192 source, marked X-571, was inside a container when it was stolen on Monday from a truck in Cardenas, a town in southern Tabasco state, the interior ministry said in a statement.
“This source is very dangerous to people if it is removed from its container,” the statement said, in the latest theft of radioactive material to hit Mexico.
The ministry launched an alert for civil protection authorities in the states of Tabasco, Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz, as well as the federal police, the navy and the army.
The theft was reported by the company Garantia Radiografica e Ingenieria.
The ministry said that, if not handled with proper protection, “this source could cause permanent injuries to the person who handles it or who has been in contact with it for a brief time [minutes or hours].”
“Being close to this quantity of unprotected radioactive material for hours or days could be fatal,” the statement warned. when an illegal tap caused a blast that killed 29 people in the central town of San Martin Texmelucan.