Mexico City is experiencing a major water shortage as reservoir levels are currently the lowest in The Capital's history. So far the government has dealt with this shortage by cutting off water to 5 million residents or about a quarter of the population during the days before and during Easter. You may be wondering what the government thought the result of this would be. One claim is that they hoped more people would leave and visit relatives living outside the Capital. However at the same time 500 trucks went through the parts of the city affected, and distributed water rations.
The fact that the cutoff mostly affected the poorer areas of the city would surprise nobody who has followed water issues for any period of time.
But one aspect of the city's water shortage is that part of the problem comes from leaky pipes. How leaky? By some estimates the pipes in Mexico City leak 50% of the water that travels through them, or as much as they deliver. And lest you think this is just a peculiarity of Mexican infrastructure, there has been a lot of attention to this problem as it exists around the world. Of course, the previous link isn't a fully comprehensive look at how big a problem leaky pipes are around the world.
Why haven't we heard more about this problem, despite all the ads encouraging people to save water?
Part of the reason is that it is very hard to estimate exactly how much water is being lost to leaks and other causes such as evaporation in the reservoirs. And frankly, it is an even harder problem to solve. Perhaps the simplest reason for the problem is that pumping massive amounts of water through a complex system of municipal pipes tends to put a lot of pressure on the pipes by its very nature. And over the years this builds up.
Also civil engineers have always expected to lose a certain percentage of the water in any public project. While more and more engineers are starting to take the issue of curbing water loss seriously, for a long time loss rates were simply part of the cost of doing business. Another issue is of course, the sheer expense of fixing the problem. In the US, that water infrastructure and the pipes in many cities has been suffering from the same aging infrastructure problems that apply to roads, the electrical grid, and the larger water and sewage plants. And of course, the same massive problem in coming up with the money to fix it. In the poorer countries infrastructure money is always a challenge to put things mildly.
One thing students of engineering and environmental science learn relatively early, to deal with a human settlement's water infrastructure is to deal with the *underground* history of that settlement both literally and figuratively. For a unique educational experience in this arena you might try taking an "Underground Tour", in your own city or the places you visit. While Seattle has perhaps the most notorious underground tour other cities such as Portland, Atlanta, Charleston, and Boston have similar offerings or may acquire them in the not too distant future. Also one can try consulting local historians or even archeologists in a surprising number of locations about the water infrastructure in your area, instead of assuming that the engineers and city planners are the only relevant experts.
Of course, to put off some of the costs of digging through all these complexities (no pun intended) various engineers have devised a number of ways to fix leaky water pipes without the cost and labor of getting to them. On British company is seeking approval for a technology that involves using introducing many small pieces of polymeric material into the water pipes, so that they can actually patch up leaks like platelets in your bloodstream. And many engineers are working on the idea of dispatching robots into sewer systems, underground tunnels, hard to reach places, and even traveling through the muncipal water pipes themselves to detect and perhaps in some cased even fix leaks.
Are these technologies going to be available in poorer countries? And are we really going to have these high tech robots making their way through aging pipes?
It's all very possible, but unlikely to replace the shovel and pneumatic drill. Meanwhile in the US we may see some of the stimulus money go to water infrastructure. And some people in the water conservation business argue that the leakage in water infrastructure should be regulated.
That's all for now! And
Say Goodnight Readers!
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