Alejandro Gomez has been without proper running water for more than three months. Sometimes it comes on for an hour or two, but only a small trickle, barely enough to fill a couple of buckets. Then nothing for many days.
Gomez, who lives in Mexico City’s Tlalpan district, doesn’t have a big storage tank so can’t get water truck deliveries — there’s simply nowhere to store it. Instead, he and his family eke out what they can buy and store.
When they wash themselves, they capture the runoff to flush the toilet. It’s hard, he told CNN. “We need water, it’s essential for everything.”
Water shortages are not uncommon in this neighborhood, but this time feels different, Gomez said. “Right now, we are getting this hot weather. It’s even worse, things are more complicated.”
First of all, pretty much all of the indigenous city is gone. All of the bulidings are from colonial or posterior times. And second, cities are built on water all the time (Vence, Suzhou, Amsterdam) And they managed to subsit just fine. The problem came when all the infrastructure used by the natives was destroyed and the solution used was to drain the lake, which has only led to a massive ammount of problems.