Mexico City - A looming water disaster

As it has in much of Texas, drought has clobbered great swaths of Mexico this year, killing crops and livestock and threatening to dehydrate major cities. Among the harder hit is Mexico City and its sprawling suburbs, thirsty home to some 22 million people. Taps already are running dry for weeks at a time in large sections of the metroplex, especially in poorer neighborhoods. Officials warn that without extraordinary deluges in the coming weeks, extreme scarcity will stalk the area once the dry season begins in late October. The sierra-encircled basin that holds the Mexican capital was a vast lake bed when the Spaniards took it from the Aztecs nearly 500 years ago. Planners have been draining it ever since to make way for humans, treating the area's water more as a nuisance than a necessity. That worked pretty well for a very long time. It doesn't any more. In one indication of the stress, “fossil water” that's 2,000 years old is being pumped up from an aquifer beneath one parched section of Mexico City this summer. “The problem in the Valley of Mexico is the over-exploitation of the aquifers,” said Jose Luis Luege, director of the National Water Commission. “That is problem number one.” Cutzamala and other systems that supply the Mexico City basin now hold but a fraction of their normal volumes. To assure a supply of water during the coming dry season, local officials this month ordered a 30 percent cutback in the supply from those reservoirs to the city...HoustonChronicle