Mexico City could run out of water in a month unless it rains | Hacker News Reader

Mexico City could run out of water in a month unless it rains

businessinsider.com

55 pointsTeever37 comments

>Crumbling infrastructure is also contributing to the problem. About 40% of Mexico City's water is lost due to leaky pipes and other issues, the Post reported.

Similar issues in many places, pipes build ages ago and no maintenance done in decades.

And still there's no incentive to fix this? Not even for the sake of the future generations?

The UK also has a lot of leakage. It would be nice to fix it but it's slow and expensive, often requiring digging roads up to get at the pipes.

A lot of our water comes from groundwater and I guess the leaks go back into the ground so it all works out sort of.

If you have the ability to fix this, you are getting bribed to not fix it (i.e. the subcontractor paid to handle this is pocketing the money and giving you a %). Rocking the boat means the gravy train ends, and you’ll probably be tortured to death if you’ve inconvenienced the cartel for “the sake of future generations”.

Quite frankly unless there is a US intervention in Mexico (never gonna happen as the US would lose) or a large scale revolt this will probably never change meaningfully.

Why do you say that the US would lose an intervention in Mexico? As long as the goal is simply to remove the existing cartel system it doesn’t seem that hard. I don’t think the Mexican people would see it as an attack in the same way that people in various middle eastern or Asian countries saw US intervention as an attack on themselves. The cartels have enough support to stay in power but I feel like the people would abandon them if the US were to get involved directly.

But, I am not Mexican so I’m just speculating really.

Obviously the US would win in an actual military engagement to take down the Cartels, it would just not be worth the monetary and political cost. If a Mexican civilian is killed by an order from an American while attempting to oust the cartel, you better believe the cartel is going to broadcast the US as evil as possible to stir up sympathetic Americans into fighting the US government to stop the intervention, and get Mexicans to side with them as some sort of revolution against the US which would be quite popular in certain areas. If the US ensures 0 civilian deaths, the cartel automatically wins when they just operate within civilian infrastructure. Targeted raids to limit civilian casualties means boots on the ground and american casualties, which will rile up americans who don’t want americans to die for an internal mexican power struggle.

One of the cartels would have to basically pull a 9/11 level event for an intervention to ever happen, and they will never do that because they know the US is content to leave them be as long as they stay in their own lane, and they’re right because the US doesn’t care about them at all as long as they don’t kidnap american tourists (this is why whenever it does happen, the cartel will happily investigate and bring them into custody)

A lot of mexicans dislike the US and much as they dislike the cartels. Latin american politicians love to blame the US for their own political failings and corruption, so a large minority of people legitimately believes their local warlords have their interests in mind over imperialist usa. I’m mexican (moved to the USA) so maybe I’m biased or maybe things changed over the last few years but the average mexican is more likely to side with Russia than America purely because they dislike usa. I mean even young latin americans that live in america think all of their countries problems are because of america, its not unrealistic to think they will turn around and start fighting the US if there was ever an intervention.

The US federal government has come close to formally designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations several times in recent years. This would provide the legal justification for direct military intervention, most likely in the form of drone strikes. So far they have held off on the terrorist designation because it would poison relations with Mexico. It would essentially be saying the quiet part out loud and acknowledging that Mexico is a failed state which no longer controls their own territory.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexican-drug-cartels-terrorist-...

If 80% of the Mexican voters approved US going in guns blazing, then that would be a different conversation, although lets hope it doesn't get that bad to seriously consider this.

> Quite frankly unless there is a US intervention in Mexico (never gonna happen as the US would lose)

This is such a strange hypothetical. The US is not expansionist, why would it attack Mexico? Helping people with the barrel of a gun was tried in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a very large part of the US population did not like that at all. But you could say that the Iraq and Afghanistan regimes were enemies of the US. Mexico is in no way an enemy, the idea that the US would start a military action against Mexico is baffling. I never heard of anything like that. And if the US starts such an action, but the popular will is against it, it's a certain recipe for disaster. The defeat in Vietnam was not due to the US being beaten on the battlefield, it was due to the domestic anti-war protests.

The recognized united mexican states is not an enemy in this case, the recognized state does not actually control large swaths of its claimed territory or even some of its own armed forces. What happens in mexico at the state and local level is mostly up to the highest bidder, and that’s what the intervention would be about. Even the federal government doesn’t even control part of its own armed forces, they are just paid off and too many people are too well protected.

It would be like if California Highway Patrol was in the drug business, and they used their legitimate power to create a system to ensure they could legally do this all in the open because the guy in charge of keeping them in check is getting a cut of whatever they sell, all while sabotaging efforts to do anything about what’s going on. Even if someone did finally get enough evidence, there’s enough paid off government employees that it will just get lost. If all else fails and government officials start acting to remove you, well, there’s a reason being a mexican politician is so deadly…

It would not be USA vs Mexico, it would be USA and part of the mexican military under Mexican control vs Fuerza Tamaulipas mixed in with cartel foot soldiers and “”””civilians””””.

The cartels would make sure to frame it as Mexico vs USA (calling the mexican government collaborators in the pocket of big bad usa of course), so they could replenish their foot soldiers fighting the “anti imperialist revolution” (straight from the terrorist playbook, because they are terrorists holding the entire population as blackmail).

> This is such a strange hypothetical. The US is not expansionist, why would it attack Mexico?

Mark Esper says in his memoir that Donald Trump in 2020 asked about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to destroy the cartels' drug labs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/us/politics/mark-esper-bo...

Since that administration leaked like Niagra falls, I wouldn't take the information necessarily to mean that the hypothetical question was unique, just that it leaked.

Given that he didn't launch any missiles, just like everyone else, I'm not sure there's anything to get worked up about.

So what? He asked, and presumably he got an answer. The answer was most likely that yes, it technically is possible, but it's not a good idea, because there are so and so issues with doing that. Did Trump insist, or he left it at that?

Unless you can figure out a way to bill fetuses for capital projects, gonna have to go with a "nope!".

I know I'm being a little silly here, but this kind of thing is what you get with under-/post-/non-industrialized populations that crank their GDP from . . somewhere. Classic example are oil states[1], but it goes to some extent for the US as well, where our dominance results from the USD's reserve status[2], rather than any great vitality among the citizenry.

Anyway, when you don't really care about how well the citizens do, then . . why spend money getting them nice water? Especially if you've gone with professional, high tech militaries and all the state surveillance money can buy.

[1] Where the Maximum Leader is genuinely better off without pesky citizens, just (possibly foreign!) wage slaves to mine/pump and a chunk of loyal soldiers.

[2] I also have a personal theory, that started as a joke (and now it's not quite a joke anymore), called "The Blood Standard". How many people can your nation kill in 24 hours? This gives you a baseline for your foreign exchange. UU, Russia, China? They could probably kill a good chunk of the world's cities, so their currencies have a hard floor. Mexico or Brazil? Good frickin' luck.

Elon Musk and the Boring company to the rescue?

Pipe retrofitting in San Francisco took years, along its main street Van Ness.

How long would this take in Mexico?

A very long time. Two reasons why that combine to make things even worse: The cumbersome Mexican government bureaucracy (both Federal and belonging to the Capital district, which due to its size and influence might as well be its own national government) being generally sclerotic to the point of near uselessness for anything requiring long-term, planning-driven effort that doesn't just benefit a certain coterie, and the fact that much of Mexico City has been built over the literally, purposely buried ruins of the ancient Aztec capital, making underground digging an even bigger legal nightmare if archaeological remnants are discovered and said discovery made public. (applies mainly to the central part of the city).

Live here by the way, since nearly 2 decades ago, so lots of experience with the bureaucracy aspect and the general workings of government.

Why do you think Boring would do any good there?

I always thought that desalination of sea water was too energy expensive to be worth it but apparently it's only about 3 kWh/m^3, meaning for an average water consumption of 150l/day you're looking at under 0.5kWh per person per day - about 5c (us) at Mexico's electricity prices.

Obviously it's not something that can be implemented in the next month in Mexico, but the long term outlook for water supply in a future hotter world is not as dire as I thought.

The UAE gets the majority of its water already through desalination: https://u.ae/en/information-and-services/environment-and-ene...

For Mexico City in particular I think the real killer is not cost of desalination but cost of transport. Mexico City is hundreds of miles from the coast and at an altitude of 7,000 feet. That’s a long way to move water, which is an expensive operation energy-wise.

With the cost of PV now, city-scale RO makes a lot of sense. San Diego did it when was still far more expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...

That's 22,5 million people without water. This isn't a shortage bottled water or a couple of water filled trucks are going to solve. Meanwhile, in our area of the world we're experiencing the wettest first six months of a year ever.

https://archive.is/s4U6o

Nobody has mentioned the folly of continuing to build more and more and more in the middle of a dried out desert lake. We keep doing it here too (looking at Phoenix, Vegas, and LA). Every time we get to this point there is hand wringing and finger pointing- and nobody states the obvious. No more people can move to these places. They’re out of water. Conservation and fixing pipes won’t make more. As far as I know , no locale has banned building permits and population growth, it will be interesting when then first place does.

Also would recommend Cadillac Desert on this topic.

Desalinization solves that problem. More people can and will move to all of those places.

Doomsayers keep predicting the end of civilization and then the people that contribute to the world innovate and prove them wrong.

The truth is, those people are just anti-natalists hoping for the end of humanity.

Civilization has kept going, but it's no challenge to find the ruins of cities long gone. They failed and never came back.

You'll find those ruins underneath the city that exists on top of them.

Plenty of cities just failed permanently. No one ever rebuilt.

Desalination doesn't seem particularly practical for high elevation cities that are far from a coast.

We ship lots of liquids to high elevations cities for reasonable prices.

It's been 100-110 F / 38-43 C in northern and central eastern Mexico for weeks now. Howler monkeys are even dying: https://youtu.be/uzSaHrzkgDo

My guess is that water delivery trucks are somewhat available in Mexico already and they’ll come from around the county, stage around Mexico City wherever the water is, and people will get buy paying whatever they charge for a bit.

Related discussion on the CNN report in Feburary:

Mexico City may be just months away from running out of water

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500283

Don't completely disagree with the general trend of what the article is predicting, since it really is a logistical nightmare to provide water to nearly 23 million people in a fairly dry valley metropolis filled with under-maintained infrastructure.

However, I think they overstate the real risk of the city either running out of water or not having rain before the month has gone by (forecasts are predicting a massive rainfall and storms in the next couple weeks for the central region of this country).

Also, maybe this was my biggest nitpick as someone who's been living here for many, many years: "Mexico City could run out of drinking water"

Next to nobody, not even the very poor, actually drinks any of the municipal water. The bottled water industry in Mexico is fantastically extensive, innovative and manages to deliver its product to nearly every corner as far as I've ever seen. Even to the most isolated villages, and yes, the vast majority of people use that water for their actual drinking.

Yes, you could argue that the municipal water of the capital district and its surroundings is what gets purified and bottled, and you'd be right, but only partly. The companies providing it are remarkably good at rerouting to new supply sources if local water dries up in any one region. I've seen them do it time and again.

It's a real shame. The city is a historical and cultural treasure

"Drain our lake to build your city? Karma."

- The Aztecs

Isn’t the total genetic mass of Mexico City primarily descended from natives such as the Aztecs? I don’t think of Mexico City as being run by Spaniards.

It’s not exactly karma if the past lake draining is primarily affecting the natives’ descendants. More of an ongoing tragedy in that case.

Fair point. One idea for a solution: https://www.businessinsider.com/railroad-worker-delivers-wat...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com