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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 7 · 2 April 2020
Where water used to be
by Rosa Lyster
On the second to last day of last year, I got on a flight to Mexico
City. Four hours in, we were told we needed to make an emergency landing
in Houston. The captain had noticed an oil leak shortly after we left
New York. The air hostess made her announcement first in English, then
in Spanish, and told us that we shouldn’t be alarmed if we saw a lot of
fire engines on the runway as we landed – they were waiting for us. Part
of me wondered why she thought anyone would be soothed by this
explanation. The other part was so scared my teeth were hurting.
The man sitting on my left swallowed six or seven times, and then stared
hard at his legs. The man on my right took out his Sudoku book and
started doing puzzles at a clip that suggested he was either a savant or
not giving them his full attention. He ended one with a flourish that
made his pen tear through the page, and then looked at me and said:
‘Sorry.’ Crunched up in the middle seat, I thought it bizarre and
possibly cruel to tell us straight like that, to keep us abreast of
developments, even though those developments were so bad.
I’ve had an aversion to being told the truth about bad situations since
2018, when Cape Town city officials first told us we were running out of
water. The taps, they said, would be turned off when the six reservoirs
that collectively supply the city’s water dropped to 13 per cent of
capacity. They were already down to 21 per cent. We didn’t have to take
the officials’ word for it – we could drive past the Steenbras or the
Theewaterskloof dam and see for ourselves that there was hardly anything
in them. The newspapers made a point of saying that we were going to win
the worst race in the world and be ‘the first major city to run out of
water’. The phrase terrified me not only because of what it meant for
Cape Town but because it implied a second city, and a third, and a
fourth, were about to loom into view. When the rains came, the fact that
we hadn’t run out of water seemed merely a temporary respite, an
unearned reprieve that someone else would have to pay for. We had moved
to the front of the queue, and then we were shuffled back a bit. Before
we were at the front, it was São Paulo. After us, it was Chennai. Always
threatening to push in front, Mexico City.
Cape Town’s water crisis was complicated, but in one sense all too easy
to grasp: we could see just by looking that we didn’t have enough water.
Mexico City is different. A few years ago, I heard a scientist at a
conference say that Mexico City was ‘drinking itself to death’, and
while I have often thought of that description since then, I didn’t
really understand what she meant. It’s difficult to picture an aquifer,
even when it’s described as a ‘vast underground lake’. I went to Mexico
City to understand how a city could be drinking itself to death. When I
got there I wanted instead to be lied to, not to see the cathedral
lowering itself into the ground and the sinkholes opening up in the
street, the ankle-deep trickle where a river used to be, or the trucks
toiling up a hillside to deliver water to neighbourhoods that haven’t
had a regular supply in a decade. I didn’t want to have to stop myself
crying when a man began a description of his childhood in Michoacán with
the words, ‘I always thought that the rain was splendid,’ as if he was
talking about something extinct.
I went with my translator, Ulises, to Ecatepec, the sprawling
municipality on the hills outside Mexico City that is believed to have
the highest rate of femicide in the country. A few years ago, it was
reported that the bodies of 21 women had been found in the black canal
that crawls through the city. Officials denied these reports, although
they bowed to public pressure and issued a ‘gender alert’: a warning, or
an acknowledgment, that women and girls were being systematically
targeted and murdered. We could just about see the canal, whose name
means ‘river of remedies’, from where we stood. It felt as though we
were in the mountains: thin air, navy blue sky. We were walking towards
the last houses high up the hill, watching the water trucks make the
almost vertical climb, and listening to the dogs barking and the brakes
screeching. The women who live on the street were standing outside their
gates, as they do every morning when the municipal water supply is
unavailable or unreliable, which in Ecatepec is most mornings. On that
street, nothing had come out of the taps in five months. The women were
telling the drivers what to do with cheery impatience, nudging dogs away
from children, buying bread from a man on a motorbike – coping, the way
it’s said that women in places like that do.
I’d met one of them before, a woman in her sixties called Yolanda who’d
moved to Ecatepec thirty years ago, on the advice of a doctor who’d told
her the air was better there. She’d come from Iztapalapa, another
sprawling municipality on the periphery of the city, also notoriously
dangerous, also a bad place to be a woman or a girl. The air in
Iztapalapa had made her husband sick, and the water was full of worms,
or was slimy and black. Sometimes it was red. She told me this while
wrestling an array of small but insistent challenges into submission:
phones ringing, old men in hats who wanted her to listen to them
complain, my failure to bring a jumper with me, dogs barking, children
needing breakfast, people at the gate, my failure to wrap the scarf she
had found for me tightly enough for her liking. I could see exactly what
she’d be like in a crisis. Her great-granddaughter, Aimee, a tiny girl
of six, sat on her lap and submitted to having her plaits undone, while
performing a short monologue called ‘I Hate it When I Have to Get My
Plaits Undone’.
As she brushed out her great-granddaughter’s hair, Yolanda said that
sometimes the pipas didn’t bring enough water for the street, so she and
some of the other women would bring the driver into the house and hold
him there until SACMEX, the federal water operator, sent another truck.
She pointed to the table where they sat him, not with a gun actually
held to his head – no need, they all knew the gun was in the room – and
gave him coffee and pastries while they waited for the second truck to
arrive. Ulises mentioned this thing with the gun, which some people
would describe as kidnapping, as we walked up the hill. I said something
pathetic about adapting to difficult circumstances, getting used to
things you’d never imagine you could get used to. Some rubbish about
frogs in boiling water. He said that was one way of looking at it. The
other way of looking at it was that we were talking about a situation in
which one person has the water, and the other has the gun.
That Cape Town didn’t run out of water in 2018 is now being framed as a
story of resilience and adaptability. When tourists arrive at the
airport, one of the first things they see is a big sign exhorting them
to Save Water Like a Local. The suggestion is that we did something
special and a bit mysterious. A lot of us did ‘change our relationship
with water’. It’s difficult not to respond with alarm when you see a
councillor describing the situation as ‘utterly catastrophic’, or when
you hear about engineers crying in meetings. There were a few people who
refused to be swayed from their conviction that this was one of those
scams the government pulls from time to time in order to hike up water
tariffs. Some of those people, among them a member of the provincial
legislature, found a way to turn it into a conspiracy involving the
‘Jewish mafia’. That really did happen. Alongside the barking mad, there
were those who were just a bit bored and irritated by the whole
business. Wouldn’t it be fine? Weren’t we more or less OK?
Mostly, we did our bit. We stuck to the limit of fifty litres a day, and
those of us who weren’t used to spending our days thinking about water
learned exactly how far that amount will get you, as well as how to get
it, how to carry it, and how to reuse it without making anyone sick. We
learned how much time you spend worrying about water when the prospect
of its running out altogether is weeks away: hours and hours, days and
days. All the time. We talked about toilets at every opportunity, long,
animated, genuinely disgusting conversations about the disposal of human
waste. We tried hard because we were scared, and that effort could be
described as special and exemplary, especially if you were short of
feelgood stories about climate change, but it’s not what saved us. What
saved us was that it rained, after four years of not raining. There’s
not a great deal of evidence to suggest that we can rely on this
happening again, let alone every year. It just doesn’t seem realistic.
At the time of writing, I haven’t heard of a single convincing plan to
prevent a recurrence of the crisis, in Cape Town or anywhere else. This
isn’t to suggest that I would like people to stop trying to find one.
It’s more that the only solution I’d find reassuring would be the
repeated and emphatic use of the words: We are fine, we are fine, we are
fine.
We aren’t fine. In five years’ time, two-thirds of the world’s
population is going to be living in a state of ‘water stress’, according
to the UN. Either we won’t have enough or it will be dirty or we won’t
be able to access it without difficulty. Thirty-three cities are
currently suffering ‘extremely high’ water stress, according to the
World Resources Institute, which is another way of saying that they are
using most of the water they have. This will only get worse as the
effects of climate change intensify. Rising temperatures will encourage
the flourishing of bacteria and other pathogens. Rising sea levels will
salinate freshwater sources, rendering them unusable. More drought means
more hunger, but it also means more violence, according to the growing
body of research that indicates an ‘overt’ correlation between acute
water stress and violent conflict (recent studies have also pointed to
the strong connection between resource depletion and violence against
women). More flooding means more damage to already compromised
sanitation infrastructure, as well as contamination of the remaining
supply. In ten years’ time, India will have half the water it needs, as
will Zimbabwe, although in its case ten years is an optimistic
timeframe, given the unwavering severity of the drought there. Forty per
cent of Beijing’s water supply is currently too polluted to use, and
Mexico City is draining its aquifers 50 per cent faster than they can be
replenished.
I’d always thought people were being metaphorical when they said that
Mexico City was sinking, or at least that the evidence of it would be
invisible to anyone other than a hydrologist or an engineer. But no: the
city is subsiding as it draws more and more water from further and
further below the surface, collapsing into the clay lake-beds on which
it was built, and even someone who doesn’t know what an aquifer is can
see it. In the Metropolitan Cathedral, you can feel it: the floor tilts
unevenly, the columns list and if you close your eyes while you’re
walking, it’s like being on a boat. In 2016, Pope Francis addressed his
bishops there. He urged them to denounce the drug trade and to help
their congregations ‘escape the raging waters that drown so many’.
Violence is often described this way – the wave of killings, the rising
tide of crime – but it’s easy to imagine the words echoing around a
building that is slowly being submerged in a city that is drinking
itself to death. There are streets and streets of undulating buildings,
stories of collapsing primary schools, a sinkhole in Iztapalapa that
swallowed up a child. This shouldn’t be happening anywhere – a sinkhole
is a dead giveaway that something has gone badly wrong – but it really
shouldn’t be happening in Mexico City, which gets more rainy days than
London. The original Aztec city, Tenochtitlan, was built on an island in
the middle of a lake, surrounded by other lakes. Before Cortés began the
process of draining them, turning the city into a place that had nothing
in common with what had been there before, it used to be a freshwater
Venice. Climate change will make this harder to say with confidence, but
Mexico City is not Cape Town. It still rains there, a lot, and all that
rain is channelled straight into the sewage system. The problem is not
water scarcity, although it now presents itself as that. It’s a problem
of water management, and infrastructure, and inequality.
Because Mexico City sits in a lake basin surrounded by mountain ranges,
more than two kilometres above sea level, and because there’s no river
or ocean that would serve as a natural drainage outlet, which makes it
prone to flooding, the challenge for most of the modern city’s history
always has been getting waste water and rainwater out. The second
challenge was getting enough drinking water in, which involved digging
vast wells to tap into the Valley of Mexico aquifer, and creating
bewilderingly complicated hydroengineering systems to bring water from
the Lerma and the Cutzamala rivers, 60 km and 150 km away respectively,
and pump it up a thousand metres to the city’s reservoirs. People talk
about the Cutzamala System with a respect that borders on the
reverential. In 1951 Diego Rivera painted a mural inside a tunnel that
would be used to channel water from the Lerma into the city’s
reservoirs. It shows engineers wearing short colourful jackets and
pointing at maps, people swimming, labourers digging tunnels with
pickaxes, a child watering a garden, axolotls and a small boy in pink
shorts holding hands with a monkey. Although Rivera used a special kind
of paint intended to prevent erosion, the mural started deteriorating
almost as soon as the water from the Lerma flooded into the tank and, in
1990, the supply was redirected. After careful restoration, it was
reopened in 2015; now visitors come to look at a place where water used
to be, which feels very much in keeping with the mural’s didactic
spirit. The new museum does an excellent job of hammering home Rivera’s
point: water is political and access to it determines the course of
one’s life. It also makes a distinction between ‘giving water to the
people’ (represented in the mural by an indigenous mother) and
‘quenching the thirst of the bourgeoisie’ (represented by a pious lady).
In Mexico City, everywhere is a place where water used to be. Almost
nothing remains of the five lakes the original city was built on,
although the memory of water is there in the names of the streets and
the highways that were once canals. Twenty-two million people need a lot
of water, but the other reason the aquifer is draining is that 40 per
cent of the water in the system is lost through leaks in
earthquake-damaged pipes. As the city sinks deeper, it damages the pipes
even more, compromising an already profoundly compromised system. The
water in places like Ecatepec and Iztapalapa will get dirtier, and there
will be less and less of it, which means more reliance on the pipas, and
more situations where one person has the water and the other person has
the gun. Of course this isn’t the only possible outcome. There are many
people trying to ensure it doesn’t come to that. But most projections
indicate that the Valley of Mexico aquifer will be entirely depleted
within forty years, and there doesn’t seem to be the political will to
address this situation. I want to keep saying to myself: We are fine, we
are fine, we are fine.
Rosa Lyster is researching a book about the global water crisis with the
support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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