THE VANISHING CITY. 35 MILLION AND A POLE.

 

Mexico City: “Microcosm of the Planet to Come”. “Symbol of human predicament worldwide”.

 

Five centuries of fighting water and not using it.

 

If Mexico’s rulers were to rule the Sahara they would soon run out of sand. Friedman may or may not have said that, one thing for sure, Mexico City - Mexico as a whole for that matter - is running out of water fast. Subsoil water extraction made the city sink eight meters or more in the past century and the sinking goes on. Surprisingly, the city is threatened by big inundations too. Huge volumes of drinking water are pumped up into town at staggering cost from far-away sources deep down, huge volumes of rainwater are flushed away unused through the main sewer, overcharged to the point of bursting. A mere 10% wastewater and stormwater (rainfall) is treated, and the industry uses drinking water. The city is constantly flooded, yet it is out of water

 

How did they manage? What’s going on here? A combination of factors: history, a deeply ingrained centralism, short-term policies, a run-away population explosion, brain drain to the U.S. and widespread ignorance from top to bottom. Plus the unique geography: a valley of 9,600 square km over two km. high, enclosed by steep mountains up to 5,000 meters, on the spongy beds of seven former lakes covering 23% of the valley with no rivers flowing in or out. No one in his right mind would build a vast industrial capital of steel and concrete there. Spaniards and Mexicans did.

 

CITY IN THE LAKES.

Average annual rainfall is 720 mm. and is intense from May to October, so quick drainage is a must to prevent flooding. The Aztecs had managed that, to a point, with dikes and canals, and by keeping the lakes, source of their food, scrupulously clean. Still, floods kept coming occasionally and it remained an awkward place, even for only 100,000 Aztecs. But Cortes was adamant: Mexico City had to be built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, in the middle of a lake, right there and nowhere else.

 

Now if only the conquerors had been 17th-century Dutch....They weren’t. They were low-class medieval Spaniards, land animals with no feeling for water. They tore down the intricate Aztec water works and soon torrential stormwater swept off the steep deforested overgrazed sierras filling the lakes with soil and making them overflow. But the lakewater flooding Mexico City was no longer clean: filled with sewage and corpses of Indians, horses and dogs, it was fetid and evil smelling. Lakes thus became the enemy. They had to be drained dry. The only way to do so was by cutting a cleft through the northern mountains.

 

BIG FLOOD 1.

With the help of 60,000 underpaid and underfed Indians, many of whom died, the German Heinrich Martin did so and finished his Tajo (cleft) de Nochistongo and the connecting Tula tunnel in 1607. The northern lakes partly ran dry. But something had gone wrong (sabotage?): heavy rains wrecked constructions in 1628, and Mexico City was flooded again. This time for five long years, because 30,000 Indians, the workers, had drowned. The Spaniards went into exile in Puebla and only 400 remained. Heinrich Martin, in his 70’s, was jailed and died shortly afterwards, an embittered man.

 

Still, suggestions to move Mexico City to a place that made sense were rejected and things muddled on. An improved Cleft was finally finished in 1804 and the lakes in the north were drained. But the Texcoco Lake, the biggest and nearest, was not, so floods continued. Also, the lake was an obstacle for the city expansion the rulers had in mind. It had to disappear.

 

THE GRAND DRAINAGE CANAL (G.D.C.)

So once the revolutionary chaos was over, Porfirio Diaz resumed works on a much bigger scale and the Grand Drainage Canal (Gran Canal de Desague, G.D.C) was opened in 1900: a 58 km. open drainage ditch, graded to carry the sewage from downtown Mexico City to the north and then through the 10 mile Tequixquiac tunnel to the Hidalgo state. There, the sewage, laced with heavy metals and toxins is used for watering the crops Chilangos (Mexico City people) eat, or carried off to the Gulf.

 

With the Texcoco Lake drained and with the G.D.C. in place, inundations seemed over, as well as the water supply problems. True, cut-out-and-get-out deforestation had finished off the city’s outside freshwater springs, but no problem, drinking water was now tapped from the city’s recently detected underground water layer (aquifer). The first wells were drilled in 1854, by 1900 there were 1,000 and they now number 2,700, not counting 13,000 illegal ones.

 

New problems arose: the old saline lake beds and the city’s subsoils, drained of water, compacted and as from 1861 the city started sinking four or five cm. a year. About 20 times Venice’s sinking rate (22.86 cm. between 1900 and 2000), but with the exception of some scientists and owners of cracking buildings, few cared and nothing was done. In fact, life wasn’t too bad for most of the 1.5 million people living there in the 1930’s.

 

Then, in 1945, industrialization broke out: countryside development, small-scale farming, reforesting and erosion control were forgotten, and all resources were poured into industry, commerce and construction. Millions flocked from the poverty-stricken countryside to the factories and facilities of the big city. In the 60’s, the bulging population, then 6 million, started spilling over from proper Mexico City (the Distrito Federal) into the surrounding State of Mexico (the Edomex). Peaceful agrarian villages were overrun, turning overnight into unsightly satellite settlements of millions, creeping high up the shanty-scarred hilltops, down into the gullies, around abandoned rail tracks. Greater Mexico City, the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (the MCMA) came into being, run by two feuding governments and two budgets.

 

MEXICO CITY– WHERE’S THE END?

This wild, chaotic expansion by huddled masses and transnationals alike continues till today, into all directions. A new exclusive suburb of luxury malls, private elite schools and transnationals, Santa Fe, rises as a medieval fortress among the slums in the west; Reichman investments have established a 55-floor parking-and office complex downtown on Reforma Ave., the biggest of the whole of Latin America, and plans for more highways, double-deck highways, tunnels, suburban trains and airports are booming. Squatter invasions continue unhindered in the city’s endangered water recharge zone in the south. The MCMA’s water needs rise by more than 1000 liters/second a year, and each extra urbanised square kilometer requires another 500 liters/s. Yet, water or no water, helter-skelter expansion and building go on.

 

As a result, no one knows TO ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY where modern Mexico City, megacity of the world’s megacities, begins and ends (ask any official or embassy). In 1995, Washington’s National Research Council [1] included 17 urbanised Edomex counties in its Mexico City’s Water Supply Report (the only serious one so far). Today most reports count 28 or 43, and the U.S. consulate’s report of last year counts 34, comprising 4,900 square km or about half of the Valley.

 

THE CURSE OF NUMBERS.

Never mind. Despite ignoring where and what Mexico City is, Inegi, Mexico’s census bureau boldly claims 22.7 million are living there [2], a figure frequently quoted by embassies and foreign correspondents. As one correspondent told me: «no way we can count all those people ourselves». Right. But Inegi’s figures are doubted by many. So renown financial Columnist Roberto Mena of the Mexico City News [3] :– “Inegi–that utterly inept manipulator of facts and figures”; Washington’s respectable NRC in its Water Supply Report (Chapter 2) “official population figures aren’t reliable”. And author Gertz Manero, currently Mexico’s Security Secretary, labels official population statistics as “made-up” in his book [4].

 

Unofficial estimates placed the population at 22 million as early as in 1990 [5, p72], and Alan Riding and Business Week Editor Sol Sanders foresaw in the 80’s that the city would have 30 and 40 million, respectively, by 2000. Seen the ongoing flight from the eroded countryside and meager family planning results among the poor (no family planning without education), a figure of 35 million seems a safe guess. The million or so hawkers, street vendors and pavement-butchers clogging sidewalks and metro exits alone confirm the awesome population growth: there were none in 1970, the time the volcanoes could still be seen through the incipient smog.

 

 

THE POLE. SINKING MANKIND.

All these new plants and people needed water, so underground pumping increased and the city’s sinking rate rose tenfold to an annual 40 or 50 cm – 200 times Venice. The ground gave simply way underfoot.

 

And so an humble, rusty pole next to Revolution Monument has become a monument of its own, symbolising Mexico City’s collapse, and man’s imminent future – sinking away.

 

That pole was firmly anchored in hard clay flush with the ground in 1934, when Porfirio Diaz’ unfinished Legislative Palace was turned into the Monument commemorating his fall. It was meant to water the park around it. The pole remained where it was, but the park sank 8 meters since, as most of the city’s 24 square km downtown center.

 

That’s visible wherever you go: shattered old churches and mansions, houses tilting backward from the street, or leaning forward “like spectators along a parade route trying to get a view of the next float”, buckled and undulating streets and pavements, dipping half a meter or a meter around heavy constructions. “Like a fun house at an amusement park”, Joel Simon [5, p.60] writes. Living here, one might rather share D.H. Lawrence’s mood years ago: “the city doesn’t feel right. It feels like a criminal plotting his next rather mean crime”.

 

SINKING AIRPORTS, SINKING METROS; SNAPPING AND CRACKING.

Less visible, but far more dangerous is the damage underground:

– 50,000 burst potable water pipes are repaired each year. Still, servicing the entire huge and chaotic 12,000 km. network, not always mapped out, is impossible, so 40% of the water leaks away (20% in US cities). Thus many outskirts have to do with fee-charging pipes and community faucets, and water consumption there may be as low as 28 liters a day (50 liters is the required minimum for health standards).

– sewer lines, extending over 12,000 km. too, snap. Repairing them all, and continuously unclogging key drainage points is beyond the city’s means. The leaking sewage does not yet contaminate the aquifer, the source of 70% of the city’s water supply, because it’s protected by a layer of hard clay, but environmentalists worry a catastrophe is waiting to happen. Nearby and omnipresent garbage dumps and earthquakes causing deep subsoil ruptures help them worry.

– gasoline seeping in from cracking gasoline lines and underground storage has been observed at depths of three meters and in some layers of the aquifer. The city is becoming explosive in a literal sense too. If Guadalajara could explode, why not Mexico City?

– twice as much water is extracted from the underground than is filtering in (some say 3 times), and groundwater levels go down a meter a year. As wells are drilled deeper, concentrations of salts and other minerals rise and threaten to make the water unusable. Surprisingly, Joel Simon [5, p.88] notes, no one knows, or is willing to tell, WHEN that may be! No detailed study has been made as to how much water the aquifer contains, yet the city depends on it.

– authorities of the Mexico City Airport have to uplift their sinking airport strips every year.

– cracks of over 10 cm. wide have appeared in the eastern Pantitlan metro line junction and four metro lines are currently under repair after the derailment of a subway train.

– hollow caves causing instability in the soil’s composition make earthquakes more devastating. Proof are the 60,000 casualties of the 1985 earthquake disaster.

 

BIG FLOOD 2.

Also, sinking is not equal and the Grand Drainage Canal did NOT sink along, presently finding itself some 8 meters above the Central Square, instead of beneath. On top of that, it lost its downward gradient, becoming horizontal or even going up instead of down in the north. Its capacity fell from 90 cubic meters per second (m³/s) to 10 m³/s, then 7 m³/s in the early 1950.

Therefore, 200 pumping stations were installed in the D.F. and the Edomex to lift the sewage up into the canal and then push it up into the Tequisquiac tunnel. To facilitate that, part of the G.C.D. was piped in, but this made the sewage flow back to the city faster, and the effort was stopped.

For the rest, little else was done and the inevitable happened in 1950: heavy rains flooded the downtown city as in times bygone, with levels up to 3 meters, washing cars away and crumbling buildings, and canoes reappeared in the streets. In 1951 the same happened again.

 

The message was clear. Mexico City had reached the limits of growth, population increase, industrialisation, water consumption – of everything but brains. Simply, it had to stop.... or ELSE... Mexico’s rulers chose ELSE, taking stopgap measures only. Expensive stopgap measures at that.

 

WATER NO MORE.

First, multi-billion-dollar projects Lerma and Cutzamala River were carried out, tapping water from outside sources far away and 1,200 meters down. They currently supply 27% of Mexico City water, at a cost of 4 and 7 times that of water pumped from the underground. The catchments areas were ruined, farmers had to stop farming, and the environmental disaster was felt as far away as the Chapala Lake, Guadalajara’s water supply source. Such was the destruction that all further mega-plans were shelved, including the Aquaferico, a pipeline to carry 5000 liters/s from the western to the eastern Edomex counties through the southern D.F. The aimless pipe, stuck in the District’s southern mountains, joined the ranks of Mexico’s vast herd of white elephants.

 

Hence, no more water for Mexico City’s southeast periphery from outside sources. People there have to fend for themselves and do so by more underground pumping, thus creating mass-inhabited swamps, waiting for the next flood.

 

Second, wells in the center were closed and new ones were drilled in the southeast, mostly rural then, where people wouldn’t protest much. Now the eastern D.F. (Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa and the airport) and the eastern Edomex counties do the sinking – an average 30 to 40 cm. Roads dip for no apparent reason, streets are replaced by raging rivers in times of heavy rains, floods are worsening and the summer 2000 flood of Chalco Valley was spectacular, paralysing the Mexico City-Puebla highway for days. More such floods threaten, and the millions now living there are worried: they don’t like seeing their TV’s and stereos floating in the mud. And the western Edomex counties worry as well. There, too, illegal wells undermine constructions and make houses sink or break, from Naucalpan to Salsipuedes (Get-Out-If-You-Can - yes, the place DOES exist).

 

Strangely, ambitious plans for large-scale primary wastewater treatment were stalled, with little explanation and presently only 7 to 10% of the residual waters receive primary treatment (against 60 or 70 % elsewhere).

 

DEEP DRAINAGE (DRENAJE PROFUNDO).

Thirdly, another Pharaonic work, the Deep Drainage was started in 1967. A second big drainage channel, gravity conducted, but at depths of around 200 meters, thus invulnerable to earthquakes and soil sinkage and with no pumps needed. The main part, the Emisor Central, one single 70-km tube measuring 6.5 meters across, inaugurated in 1975, is fed by interceptors capturing the sewage of former rivers, now piped in. Altogether the D.D. now extends over 200 km. The D.D. also perforated the aquifer, with consequences as yet unknown.

 

The D.D. functioned well for 15 years. Then population growth and the refuse of millions in eastern Edomex counties overcame authorities once again, deluded by their own rosy statistics. The swollen Canal de la Compañia and other secondary sewer canals had to dump the wastewater at the reverted northern end of the G.C.D., which carried the smelly brown masses into town, instead of out. A solution was found, though: a connecting vertical tube  between the G.D.C and, deep down, the D.D., through which the refuge now plunges into the D.D.

 

BIG FLOOD(S) 3?

However, there are snags here. Built for stormwater only, the D.D. may have been damaged by rough sewage such as car parts, mattresses and the like some folks throw into sewage canals. High-pressure gas tensions may be building up in the tunnels, steel enforcement rods piercing their cement walls. But with the tunnels constantly overcharged, engineers haven’t been able to enter them for the past 11 years, so they aren’t sure.

 

But they DO know that a breakdown of the D.D. would not just inundate the flood-hardened slums in the east, but also the D.F., fertilizing government buildings and bureaucrats on the Main Square and coffee drinkers on the Condesa sidewalk cafes alike. “Crisis situations”, system’s manager Ing. Dovali said in an interview recently [7] ,“ lasting from 30 minutes till six hours occur 3 or 4 times in the rainy season. The D.D. is then unable to absorb even one more drip and the risk the system might explode is real”. Dovali: “I don’t say the Zocalo ( Main Square) will be inundated this very same year, but for sure it may happen in the near future. And the floods of Chalco in 2000 will be child’s play compared what is going to happen then”.

 

NO FUNDS.

The only real solution, technically feasible, Dovali said, was building a SECOND Deep Drainage tunnel. “Just give us the money and we’ll make it”. So far he hasn’t got it: politicians feel heavy expenses for wallowing in the mud deep down isn’t image boosting.

 

Instead, more stopgap measures were taken. A dike was built at the junction of the G.D.C. and the Canal de la Compañia to keep the refuse from flowing the wrong way, and huge pumps beyond that dike to push it up along the G.D.C. the right way, out of the Valley (see the drawing). Engineers hope this will sufficiently relieve the D.D. tunnels to allow them to get in and check their condition in the dry season..

 

Again, here too are some hazards. The G.D.C., with its capacity restored from 7 m³/s to 40 m³/s, may burst when rains are heavy and flood the eastern Edomex counties. And with the Grand Canal’s ongoing slide down toward the city, these emergency constructions will hold for five years only.

 

Nor have authorities shown much interest in the relatively minor and low cost measures that have been suggested, for instance:

–Privatization of water management. Private enterprise would close or tax the 13,000 illegal wells tapping 4 m³/s to make beer, soft drinks and ice-cream. Privatization will also help define water property rights. The businessmen concerned and politicians are against, saying privatization will hurt the poor.

–One single clearly defined central water agency to manage water affairs in the MCMA, instead of the present 5 or 6 quarreling water jurisdictions.

–An overhaul of the pricing, metering and billing system.

–more primary water treatment. This is not as easy as some believe, but certainly much more could be done here.

–Installation of regulatory pressure valves, specifically in the western areas. Such valves would drastically reduce leakage (without them the pressure and resulting risks of snapping water pipes and leakage increase if the demand is low).

 

Only the pressure valves seem to be on track.

 

CLOWNS AND SICK PEOPLE RULING US.

In short, this is what we are at now: of the city’s two main sewer outlets, one is underused because of soil subsidence, the second one permanently overloaded to the point of bursting. 10 % of the country’s energy output is used for pumping water 1,200 meters up from afar, and pumping water out, to keep the capital alive,– if not well. The city is constantly flooded, yet it is out of water. Wastewater treatment stands at a mere 7%, factories use drinking water; gasoline filtering in may cause explosions, and earthquakes become more devastating. YET haphazard building continues all over, increasing the weight of steel and cement pushing the city further down.

 

Somehow the clown of the late Heberto Castillo’s parable comes to my mind here. The clown is blowing up a balloon. Hoards of children around him are looking on in fear. They know the balloon is going to burst, but they don’t know WHEN. They are frightened, yet don’t run away. Almost all city people are aware and afraid of the water problem, yet fears are suppressed and no one acts.

 

Regarding a policy reversal needed, NOW!, forget about it. Forget about decentralization, countryside development, reforestation, and erosion. Be a realist. “Those Sick People Who are Ruling Us [8]-, that French book of 25 years ago, is relevant as never before. Instant profit making, money laundering interests, fatalism and sheer madness rule the world of which Mexico is part. So the urban sprawl will further spread, at whatever cost. As anywhere else, disasters only can change the present course. In Mexico’s case, then, a massive flooding, not of slums but government buildings and bureaucrats, would be preferable to a devastating drought.

 

DROUGHT.

Amidst sinking and floods, most people seem to have forgotten that ever looming danger of drought. Droughts have haunted Mexico’s history. Droughts contributed to, or caused, the fall of Maya, Toltec and Teotihuacan civilizations, droughts killed more than half of Mexico City’s population between 1736 and 1740 and helped set off both of Mexico’s evolutions, too.

 

Characterized mainly by scarce, late and irregular rains for years in succession, these droughts can return any time and they would spell the end of today’s Mega-Mexico City, of Santa Fe as well of its surrounding slums. – Author Fco. Moreno’s SEQUIA 2004 (Drought 2004) has already painted the lively, if not inspiring, scenery of what then will happen: swarms of flies emerging from 10 million unemptied toilets eclipsing the sun; nauseating stench arising from pyramids of cremated corpses, the pest will return, and more, much more.... (Should you wish an instant depression, BUY that book).

 

But the near-drought disaster of 1998, the first time global warming hit the city, was of a totally different, more threatening kind. This time, rains weren’t the problem. Heat was. Four months of heat only were enough to bring Mexico City close, very close to becoming the world’s first “hydraulic Hiroshima”.

Record heat waves that year started early in February; trees let their leaves drop in March - a rare phenomenon -; millions were wallkkiinng with buckets for miles, sewers were broken open. By June most of the city had water left for three months only. Then the rains brought relieve, temperatures sank and (almost) everyone forgot.

 

As usual, this warning went unheeded. Few now remember 1998 and no precautions were taken, despite warnings of climate experts worldwide that global heating will continue and probably hit Mexico hard. Heat waves, they say, may return and worsen, and rainfall will get more erratic than it already is.

 

Don’t be surprised, therefore, to see Dantesque horror scenes of a drought-stricken Mexico City on your TV screen soon. Maybe as soon as in 2004, the year of Moreno’s SEQUIA. If not, soon afterwards.

Sources:

1      Mexico City’s Water Supply; National Research Council; Academia de la Investigación Científica, CHA.; Academia Nacional de Ingeniería, CHA.

2      Inegi, Radio Centro, 01.07.02.

3      The Mexico City News, 30th Sept. 2001.

4      Alejandro Gertz Manero: Mexico, Perfil de un Rostro Oculto, Lasser Press 1991 (pg. 31): The population explosion frightens the richer part of mankind, affraid of being invaded and overwhelmed by hungry masses from third world countries as Mexico, International organisations, therefore, try to keep population growth under control there. But despite the made up official statistics, results have been poor in our country.

5      Joel Simon, Endangered Mexico, 1997. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

6      Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, p. 370; Sol Sanders, Caos a la Vista, p. 223.

7      Excelsior 20.3.01, Rene Davalos.

Concepts:

Mexico City            (1) the Distrito Federal only; subdivided in 16 Delegations, crossbreeds between counties and something else; (2) the MCMA.

MCMA                   Mexico City Metropolitan Area.

The Edomex.         The State of Mexico surrounding the Distrito Federal, with an array of 122 counties. Existing maps are contradictory..

Basin of Mexico      Often used interchangeably with the Valley of Mexico.

Inegi                       Mexico’s census bureau

Chilangos               Mexico City people

D.D.                       Deep Drainage, or Drenaje Profundo (1975-1981).

G.D.C.                   Grand Drainage Canal or Gran Canal de Desagüe (1900).

m³/s                        Cubic meters per second.

AR                         Alan Riding, New York Times. Does not refer to the population issue in the supplement of 2001 to his Distant Neighbors.

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Geert Oosterhuis. 2-10-02.

Comments to: geertoosterhuis@hotmail.com