Oaxaca, Mexico: Do not drink the water!

A city official, the Regidor de Contraloría (comptroller) warned residents that the city's water supplies are of "low quality and, furthermore, contaminated by fecal coliform." Yuuck. No link provided because this is from yesterday's print editions.

Diego Marcos Ortiz Silva was interviewed in his office in City Hall, where he said that the drilling of water wells in close proximity to the rivers and creeks guaranteed that the water delivered to the city would be contaminated. He said that the rivers and streams had been contaminated "for decades with raw sewege, trash, garbage, dead animals, waste oil and heavy metals."

Ortiz Silva accused the water company, ADOSAPACO (don't ask) of failing to test water supplies before drilling the wells. He claims that the state-owned water company prefers to maintain its monopoly on the city's water supplies rather than allow many municipalities and colonias to find their own water. In other words, the water monopoly is supplying contaminated water to communities which are sitting on or near clean water supplies but are not allowed to tap those supplies.

The Comptroller pointed out that the majority of people in the city lack resources sufficient to buy bottled water, so they must drink it from the tap. And it is poison.

Now, if this happened in any civilized country, there would be a water emergency declared. The city, state and federal governments would swing into action to haul in supplies of clean drinking water. Engineers and scientists would be called in to go to work to clean up the water supply so that it no longer would cause the people to sicken and die.

But not here. Here, a city official bitches about it and the newspaper prints it and nobody else really gives a shit so nothing will be done, at least in our lifetimes. Lifetimes that will be considerably shorter if we drink the water.


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