(David P.)
2/18/2009 9:05:00 AM
Peter Franks <n...@none.com> wrote:
> (David P.) wrote:
> > The main cause of the Population Bubble is also
> > excessive credit, i.e., saying that everyone is a
> > valuable asset as long as they live.
> > L I K E H E L L T H E Y A R E ! !
> > Hordes are no longer viable, due to infirmity,
> > and become a drag on the system.
>
> I'm not aware of bubbles in nations where there are these so-called
> 'hordes' you speak of.
Once a Vision of Water, Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It
By ELISABETH MALKIN
for the New York Times
Published: March 16, 2006
MEXICO CITY, March 15 - In his chronicle of the Spanish Conquest,
the soldier Bernal Díaz marveled at the invaders' first glimpse of
Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital set on an island in a vast lake. The
city and lakeside towns, he recalled, "rising from the water, all made
of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision."
Residents of a low-income neighborhood in Mexico City waited for
their weekly water ration as a tanker truck was filled. The city is
playing host this week to an international conference of water
experts.
After the Spaniards built Mexico City on the ruins of the Aztec city
they destroyed, they conquered the lakewaters. The Aztecs had kept
floodwaters at bay through a complex network of dikes, levees and
canals. The Spaniards ignored all that and just began to drain
the water.
The result over five centuries is the most drastic reordering of the
natural environment that just about any city has carried out. In place
of the five interconnected lakes that formed the heartland of the
Aztec Empire, a megalopolis of 20 million people sits today.
Where there was once an excess of water, there is now a looming
shortage.
This week, as the city plays host to the Fourth World Water Forum,
a six-day conference of water experts, it serves as an arresting
example of the effects on water supplies of unchecked urban growth,
shortsighted management and political inertia.
"It is a system held together by a thread," said Manuel Perló Cohen,
director of the University Program for Studies of the City at Mexico's
National Autonomous University.
Mexico City and its surrounding suburbs, broadly known as the
Valley of Mexico, now extract water from their aquifers more than
twice as fast as they replenish them.
As a result, the spongy clay on which the city is built dries up and
compresses, causing it to sink. It has fallen nearly 30 feet in the
last century and drops as much as 15 inches a year in some areas.
But in the ranking of urban worries here, crime and traffic eclipse
water for the attention of the public and politicians. Only now, in
preparation for the water conference, has the local press engaged
in a bout of collective hand-wringing over the city's water worries.
They are on full display in the city's poorer eastern limits and the
neighboring working class suburbs. There, the aquifers that supply
the district of Iztapalapa, home to 1.8 million people, are
overstretched and there is no alternate source.
Berenice Hernández and her husband, Santiago García, who live
with their nine children in a three-room concrete-block house, say
they have not had running water for four weeks.
They got up at 4 one morning last week to get to the head of the
line for the district water truck. But by the time it rumbled up the
hill to their narrow street at midafternoon, it could fill only about
a foot of the family's cistern.
"They say we waste water," said Mr. García, motioning at his tiny
house with a shrug of disbelief.
The city's response to the shortage is to take its water from
elsewhere, namely the pine-forested mountains to the west. There,
a system of pumps and treatment plants carries about a quarter
of the city's water 80 miles uphill.
But it also takes water away from the poorest inhabitants of those
mountains, diverting by almost three miles the river that once
supplied the Mazahua Indians. After 25 years, they have yet to
receive the running water they were promised in return.
"We can see that there's no will from the government," to give us
water, said Francisco Araujo Guzmán, who drove with 18 other
Mazahuas to Mexico City last week to confront local officials.
The problems around wastewater are just as bad. A decade-old
project to build four wastewater treatment plants is paralyzed by
feuding among the city, state and federal governments.
The result is that the Valley of Mexico treats less than 10 percent
of its wastewater, sending its sewage into rivers that irrigate
farmland to the north.
Jesús Campos, the chief official in charge of urban infrastructure
at the National Water Commission, warns that politicians are
underfinancing the system and misleading the public by not raising
water rates, which 50 percent of people ignore anyway.
"The population will have to pay the cost of what it takes to put
water in their house," he said.
He estimates that the city should collect five times as much as it
does from its water in order to cover costs and upgrade its public
works; after all the effort to get water to the city, some 36 percent
of it is lost to leaks.
The financing needs are enormous. Mr. Campos estimates that
the backlog for Mexico City's infrastructure is $3 billion. This year,
only 10 percent of that is budgeted.
Still, Mexico City has managed to achieve the impossible when it
has had to, as with a 25-year-old project that restored a small
section of the largest of the Aztec lakes, Lake Texcoco.
By the 1950's, the lake had become a desert. Nothing could grow
in the salty soils of its parched lakebed, and windstorms whipped
its blinding dust across the city, said Raúl Solís, one of the
engineers in charge of the project.
Now, an artificial lake attracts migratory ducks, sandpipers and
herons. The surrounding hillsides have been terraced and planted
with millions of trees. Along with more than a thousand small dams,
they now contain the rainwater, so that it will seep back into the
aquifer, where it can be used.
"The purpose," Mr. Solís said, "is to harvest the water."
.
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