Mexico Conagua Water Systems
We are looking today at Mexico City water crisis. In October 2018 the national water management group cut off the city’s water supply. In the attempt to fixed the capital leaky water systems. It was the biggest event in the city the outage was supposed to last 2 days it lasted 150 hours.
During that time thirteen out of sixteen part of the cities where affected, even four of them saw their water supply shut off while the nine others experience partial outages. It only ended by November 11th.
The maintenance was necessary across the Cutzamala water system, that provides 26% of the city’s water, Conagua, Mexico’s national commission for water, needed to repair the leakages across the systems. They added a second pipeline that run side by side with the main water pipeline that will provide maintenance to the water system without cutting the supply to the city.
The Cutzamala system is one of the biggest water management systems in the world. It is also the high-pressure water systems that run essential unimpeded since it was inaugurated 37 years ago. The water system collects and stores water across seven dams located outside od Mexico City.
It also purifies water and pumps it 1,100 meters above sea level thorough one of the six pumps in the capital’s outskirts. It distributes the water in the metropolis. The entire systems run 24×7 and consumes more than 2,280 million kilowatts of electricity.
As the city grow so is the issue on providing water supply to meet the demand. With the main issue efficient rates of only 56.8%. 43.2% of water was lost across leakages or stolen. The government estimated about 85% of water inefficiencies was due to leakages. This was exactly the reason why last October the maintenance was schedule. Improving the Cutzamala system over the next five to ten years.
CONAGUA is taking active measures toward improving water distribution in the capital, thanks to series of recent legislative changes. Though the budget for the National Commission of Water was severely restricted for many years, limiting the amount of reparations and updates to the system that it can make, CONAGUA’s budget was doubled in 2019, promising further improvements. But Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s policies toward water continue to be ambiguous; it is still unclear whether some of the positive changes Enrique Peña Nieto made to the government’s water management, such as creating a new administrative body to manage water and passing the “Ley de Aguas,” will continue to hold.
Mexico City needs to find alternative ways to sustainably source water for its population. Climate change will most likely bring stronger, more powerful rains to Mexico’s valley. Without technology in place to effectively collect rainwater, most of this water will go to waste, and will only further clog the city-wide system