Taps run dry across drought-stricken Mexico
Parts of Monterrey have been without water for 75 days
Mexico, or large parts of it, is running out of water.
An extreme drought has seen taps run dry across the country, with nearly two-thirds of all municipalities facing a water shortage that is forcing people in some places to line up for hours for government water deliveries.
The lack of water has grown so extreme that irate residents block highways and kidnap municipal workers to demand more supply.
The numbers underlining the crisis are startling: In July, eight of Mexico’s 32 states were experiencing extreme to moderate drought, resulting in 1,546 of the country’s 2,463 municipalities confronting water shortages, according to the National Water Commission.
By mid-July, about 48% of Mexico’s territory was suffering drought, according to the commission, compared with about 28% of the country’s territory during the same period last year.
While tying a single drought to human-caused climate change requires analysis, scientists have no doubt that global warming can alter rainfall patterns around the world and is increasing the likelihood of droughts.
Across the border in recent years, most of the western half of the United States has been in drought. For the region, this period is now the driest two decades in 1,200 years.
The crisis is particularly acute in Monterrey, one of Mexico’s most important economic hubs and where the entire metropolitan area of about 5 million people is affected by drought, according to officials. Some neighborhoods in Monterrey have been without water for 75
days, leading many schools to close before the scheduled summer break.
The situation in the city has gotten so dire, a visiting journalist could not find any drinking water for sale at several stores, including a Walmart.
Buckets, too, are scarce at local stores — or being sold at astronomically high prices — as Monterrey’s residents scrape together containers to collect water supplied by government trucks sent to the driest neighborhoods. Some residents clean out trash cans to ferry water home, children struggling to help carry what can amount to 450 pounds of water.
Monterrey is in northern Mexico, the most parched region of the country, which has seen its population grow in recent years as the economy boomed. But the area’s typically arid weather is struggling to support the population as climate
change reduces what little rainfall the region has.
Monterrey’s residents can now walk across the floor of the reservoir that was created by the Cerro Prieto Dam and was once one of the city’s largest sources of water. The reservoir also used to be a major tourist attraction that the local government marketed for its lively waterfront restaurants and its fishing, boating and water-skiing.
The amount of rain in July in parts of the state of Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas and whose capital is Monterrey, was just 10% of the monthly average recorded since 1960, according to Juan Ignacio Barragan Villarreal, the general director of the city’s water agency.
“In March it did not rain a single drop in the entire state,’’ he said, adding that it was the first rain-free March since the government started keeping records in
1960.
Now the government distributes about 2.38 million gallons of water daily to 400 neighborhoods. Every day large trucks filled with water and pipes for distribution fan out across Monterrey and its suburbs to tend to the needs of the driest neighborhoods, often illegal settlements that are home to the poorest residents.
Alejandro Casas, a water truck driver, said that when he started the job five years ago, he supported the city’s firefighters and was called perhaps once or twice a month to deliver water to a fire scene.
But he now works every day, making up to 10 daily trips to various neighborhoods to supply about 200 families with each trip.
By the time Casas arrives, a long queue snakes through neighborhood streets with people waiting their turn. Some families carry containers
that can hold 53 gallons, and wait throughout the afternoon before finally receiving water at midnight.
The water he delivers can be all the family gets for up to a week.
No one polices the lines, so fights break out as residents from other communities try to sneak in instead of waiting for trucks to reach their neighborhood days later.
In May, Casas’ truck was stormed by several young men who threatened him as he was delivering water to one neighborhood.
“They spoke to me with a very threatening tone,” Casas said, explaining that they demanded he drive the truck to their neighborhood to distribute water. “They told me that if we don’t go to where they wanted, they were going to kidnap us.”
Casas headed to the other neighborhood, filled residents’ buckets and was set free.
Maria De Los Angeles, 45, was born and raised in Cienega de Flores, a town near Monterrey. She says the water crisis is straining her family and her business.
“I have never experienced a crisis like this before,” De Los Angeles said. “The water only comes through our taps every four or five days.”
The crisis, she said, is pushing her into bankruptcy — a garden nursery she owns is her family’s only source of livelihood and needs more water than can be provided by the occasional water that flows through her home’s taps.
“I have to buy a water tank every week that costs me 1,200 pesos,” equal to $60, from a private supplier, she said. That consumes about half of her weekly income of $120.
Small-business owners like De Los Angeles are frustrated that they are left to fend for themselves while Monterrey’s big industries are largely able to operate normally because of federal concessions that give them special access to the city’s aquifers.
To try to mitigate future shortages, the state is investing about $97 million to build a plant to treat wastewater and plans to buy water from a desalination plant under construction in a neighboring state.
The government has spent about $82 million to rent more trucks to distribute water, pay additional drivers and dig more wells, according to Barragan Villarreal, the general director of the water agency.
The governor of Nuevo Leon state, Samuel Garcia, recently urged the world to act together to tackle climate change because it was beyond the capacity of any single government to confront.
“The climate crisis has caught up to us,” Garcia wrote on Twitter.
“Today we have to take care of the environment, it is life or death.”