Water wars

Ted. Judy and I spend a lot of time in warm and dry parts of the world. Everywhere we go, someone eventually mentions water. Be it Denver, Málaga, Cape Town or Oaxaca, the local news is full of stories about water. “Where can we get more?” “How can we use less?” “This growth is unsustainable!” 

In many countries, like the US, the local community runs pipes to all of the buildings and houses and provides unlimited clean water that is pressurized for consistent flow. I wonder how many folks appreciate just how awesome that is.

That is not the case in Oaxaca. Here, the water comes from the surrounding villages in trucks and is delivered, for a fee to houses and offices. The water in these tanker trucks is pumped into a tank that is located under each building. 

From there, each building has a pump to transfer water periodically from the main tank to the cistern (small tank) on the roof. Water flows to the sinks, toilets and showers by gravity.

Access to our underground tank + pump

Black cistern on our roof

When the underground tank is empty, one places an order for more water to be delivered. The waiting time continues to increase. Just today, I took our dirty clothes to our local laundry and was told that the one day turn around will stretch to 2 or 3 days. “We have no water,” was the explanation. 

Our local English library is constantly struggling to maintain water for the bathrooms used by many visitors.

This truck water is fine for washing but, with all of the opportunities for contamination, is really unsafe for drinking. So there is another system for drinking water. Those same water trucks deliver water to small water purification shops that filter the water into refillable 20 liter (5-1/4 US gallon) bottles that cost around $2.50 each. That is what we use for making tea and coffee, brushing out teeth and drinking. 

A typical water purifying shop

And yes, they deliver!

This bottle will last us about a week.

The whole system is based upon the ability to transfer enough water by truck from wells and reservoirs in the villages to the thousands of buildings in the city. It has worked pretty well for decades but unprecedented growth is proving to be a challenge. The villages are struggling to keep up with their own needs (largely agricultural) because of recent droughts and conflicts are increasing. 

Engineering solutions include drilling large wells deep into the aquifers or constructing new reservoirs to capture more water from the seasonal rains. Local residents call for improvements but infrastructure projects like this do not seem to be important to the politicians. The governments study and plan but don’t build anything. 

This scene is being repeated in dozens of countries around the world. Occasionally, politicians get pushed to the wall. Spain recently announced they will build more desalinization plants along the Mediterranean (using EU money), so I suppose there is some hope for the future. 

But the battles continue. Many years ago, Mark Twain summed up these conflicts rather nicely, “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting about!”