“Everyone is telling us that there is an emergency, and we see people spraying water on the street with a hose”
Arriving in Tampico by plane was like observing an urbanized area surrounded by water and vegetation from the sky. Today the panorama is completely different, what is seen from an aerial perspective is completely desolate, a reflection of a crisis.
From the ground things don’t look any better, since what used to be water, boat docks and spaces with abundant birds, today is dry and cracked soil, thirsty for rain that has not yet arrived.
At the beginning of last week, the Drinking Water and Sewage Commission (Comapa) of Altamira decided to begin testing and cut off 50% of the supply to the industry. Comapa Sur joined these actions with intermittent outages.
The resource has begun to be pumped from receptacles that exist in other parts of the lagoon, but little by little it is running out, while the arrival of the liquid that comes by gravity from the El Mante area is awaited.
“Everyone is telling us that there is an emergency and we see people watering the street with a hose,” lamented the president of the Citizen Water Board, Luis Apperti Llovet, in a meeting with the media to try to explain the emergency we are experiencing.
The interviewee warned that, if it does not rain soon, the area will be left completely without water, since there will be no place to bring more, which would generate a severe crisis in all social and productive sectors.
In a tour carried out by photojournalists from EL SOL DE TAMPICO, it was found that the water disappeared in some sectors of the Chairel lagoon system, and this has generated a series of questions among the general population, the most recurrent being: where did it go?
There are several factors to consider, the first is that since 2016, almost eight years ago, there has been no torrential rainfall that would allow the Chairel-Champayan system to be recovered.
Added to this are:
Irregular extractions throughout the basin
The overexploitation
The lack of a culture of resource care
Lack of important hydraulic works
The industry uses purified water instead of reused
The secretary of water resources of the state, Raúl Quiroga, indicated that “water is being brought from other points, but we must take care of it, the testing will continue because the lagoon does not have water and the need of the population is great.”
Today we must take care of the little water that reaches the pumping system in Tampico, implement urgent measures to overcome this difficult situation that exists in the south of Tamaulipas and subsequently apply actions from home, companies, government, and society in general to avoid again the desolate panorama that we live in today.
Source: El Sol de Tampico
