Key Mexican city loses water service amid intense drought
MONTERREY, Mexico — The industrial hub of Monterrey has long been one of Mexico’s most prosperous cities, so its almost 5 million residents were shocked when they lost the most basic of services: water.
A combination of an intense drought, poor planning and high water use has left residents of Mexico’s industrial powerhouse to resort to extreme measures that call up images of isolated, poorer areas: storing water in buckets to use a scoopful at a time.
“We are panicked because we don’t know when the water will come back on,” said 60-year-old resident Maria del Carmen Lara.
Local authorities began restricting water supplies in March, as the three dams that help supply the city dried up. They currently hold only 45%, 2% and 8% of their capacity, and city authorities say the two lowest dams had only a few days’ worth of water left.
Earlier this month, they declared water would be available between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m, recently extending the service until 11 a.m. But authorities haven’t even been able to supply that. In thousands of homes, not a drop has come out of faucets for weeks.
In a stopgap measure, some of the city’s suburbs have set up giant plastic water tanks in public squares for residents to fill containers with water. So on a recent hot, sunny day, they were busy dragging buckets and bins to a water tank truck to fill them.
Big, expensive and sometimes corruption-laden water management plans have come and gone, but the lack of long-term
planning or conservation remain. One project, that would have built an aqueduct to bring water from the Panuco River, 310 miles away, to the city, which authorities at the time said would shore up the city’s water supplies for 50 years, was dropped in 2016 because of alleged corruption in the granting of contracts.
Experts say it was clear to see the crisis coming: for six years, Monterrey, capital of Nuevo Leon state, has suffered below-average rainfall or outright drought.
Set on an arid plain against the backdrop of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range, water — except for during brief, catastrophic floods — has never been abundant in Monterrey. For decades, the state’s water planning essentially came down to waiting for a hurricane in the Gulf to swell local rivers.
Juan Ignacio Barragan, the city’s water director, said Monterrey has been hit by drought and higher temperatures, which has dried up the city’s reserves. This May, the state reported its hottest average temperature, hitting 104 degrees.
“This is a situation which has forced us to ration water, to be able to distribute it more equitably throughout the city,”
Barragan said. He accused the previous administration, which governed the state from 2015 to 2021, of allowing water extraction from dams in high levels without considering the impacts that the prolonged drought had already caused to the state’s water sources.
For a city used to consuming 4,225 gallons per second, it now has only 3,435 gallons per second available.
Barragan said the city has begun an effort urging city residents to use less. Historically, average daily consumption in Monterrey has been around 42 to 44 gallons per day per person. The World Health Organization recommends 26 gallons per day.
About 60% of the Monterrey’s water comes from dams, with the rest coming from public wells. The state has private wells, which owners, ranchers and businesses drill with strict limits on how much they can pump. But those limits often appear to have been ignored, and some wells may have been drilled surreptitiously, according to state and federal officials.
According to the North American Drought Monitor, a cooperative effort between Canada, Mexico and the United States, 56% of Mexico is experiencing some level of drought.