Mexico City may be just months away from running of out water | CNN
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The metropolis of nearly 22 million people is facing a severe water crisis as a tangle of problems — including geography and leaks — are compounded by climate change.
  • theodewere@kbin.social
    0·
    5 months ago

    Around 60% of Mexico City’s water comes from its underground aquifer, but this has been so over-extracted that the city is sinking at a frightening rate — around 20 inches a year, according to recent research.

    holy crap

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    5 months ago

    What is now Mexico City used to be Tenochtitlan. An artist made a rendering of what Tenochtitlan might have looked like before the Spanish arrived. The entire place was a lake, and the city was built in the middle of the lake. It contained canals everywhere, and had causeways connecting the edges of the lake to the city.

    I wonder if Mexico City has been effectively slowly “mining” that lake for centuries. I suppose the lake will be fed by precipitation, because the city is in a bowl so any rain that falls there will be collected, but does the amount of rain come anywhere close to matching what they’re using?

    As an aside, to me it’s tragic that the main temple of the Aztecs was razed and a Catholic church was plopped down on top of it. Just as tragic is that the Spanish indoctrination process was so successful that only 0.3% of the country has a non-Christian religion. As a result, most Mexicans see the church the Spanish had built not as a grotesque symbol of the destruction of the original city, but as a good and holy place.

    • moitoi@feddit.de
      0·
      5 months ago

      Spanish drained the lake in multiple steps to build the modern city. The water they are using is ground water, pop pumping in an aquifer. Mexico city has a network of canals to drain the storm water.

      The other issue is the aquifer doesn’t recharge enough due to the urbanization and consumption. One solution is to use the rain water by cleaning it and storing.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        5 months ago

        They drained the lake, but if I understand how lakes work, the aquifer is connected to the lake bed. So, initially there was so much water in the aquifer that some of that water was above ground in the form of a lake.

        One solution is to use the rain water by cleaning it and storing.

        Are you saying that right now the rain water doesn’t reach the aquifer? Like, it’s drained outside the city? Or that instead of having it trickle down into the aquifer, they could collect it above ground and make it available more quickly by cleaning and storing it in man-made structures?

        If it’s the second, it sounds like not allowing the rain water to reach the aquifer will mean that it drains more quickly.

    • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      This is an incredible view into the past. I had no idea that tenoctitlan was so huge and organized. Thanks!

          • kandoh@reddthat.com
            0·
            5 months ago

            Wow that’s so different from the British pitting the Indians against one another. Or the Romans pitting German tribes against won another. Or the Chinese pitting the steppe nomads against one another. Or the Russians pitting the Americans against one another…

    • blazeknave@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      You’re not drinking the tap anyway. Supposedly even the ice in the drinks is from bottles. The locals drink bottled too. I’ve never gotten sick there. It’s an amazing cosmopolitan city. You’ll have a blast. The ruins are sick. The dispensaries have mushrooms if that’s your thing. Tons of seafood. It was a moral quandary for me but I indulged in octopus last visit and it’s out of this world in many restaurants. Incredible museums and art.

      • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        5 months ago

        How does one of the biggest cities on Earth have such poor quality drinking water? I’m not a water purification technician but, shouldn’t they have reasonable means to implement water treatment?

  • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    5 months ago

    I was living in Cape Town when we were like 70 days from running out of water. It’s a very bleak prospect. I remember my one doctor saying that as soon as there was no water he was closing his practice and leaving. No water means people don’t wash their hands and illnesses start spread like wildfire.

    We were lucky to get rain just before we ran out of water, but we also had a lot of conservation efforts.

    But as you can imagine, the rich people didn’t give a fuck and would water their gardens in the middle of summer and just pay the fines…