- cross-posted to:
- news
- cross-posted to:
- news
Alejandro Gomez has been without proper running water for more than three months. Sometimes it comes on for an hour or two, but only a small trickle, barely enough to fill a couple of buckets. Then nothing for many days.
Gomez, who lives in Mexico City’s Tlalpan district, doesn’t have a big storage tank so can’t get water truck deliveries — there’s simply nowhere to store it. Instead, he and his family eke out what they can buy and store.
When they wash themselves, they capture the runoff to flush the toilet. It’s hard, he told CNN. “We need water, it’s essential for everything.”
Water shortages are not uncommon in this neighborhood, but this time feels different, Gomez said. “Right now, we are getting this hot weather. It’s even worse, things are more complicated.”
So you’re saying they decided to build their capital city in the water supply instead of next to it? That they had the opportunity to not drain the lake but they did?
Who are “they” that you’re referring to? The Spanish came and drained the lake where modern Mexico City now sits. You can read more about the drainage here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco
“They” is the people who drained the lake!
All I said is don’t make your city in the middle of the lake. It was half a joke anyway. I know they can’t just fix it now.
Your statement is coming off bad because of the context.
The initial civilization built their civilization in the lake because it was a good idea. They kept the water in the lake and built giant floating farms to feed the population. If this had been maintained to the scale it was under the Aztecs, we would likely regards modern Mexico City as the premier canal City in the world.
The Spanish colonizers drained the lake because they didn’t understand the system and chose to remake the area in the image of their homeland as much as possible.
We are now dealing with a post colonial nation that has significant infrastructure built in the area.
Yeah, their ancestors fucked up 4-500 years ago. You can blame them all day long, rightfully so, but it does nothing to help remediate the current situation. It’s like you’re trying to place blame on the city’s current leadership, what exactly do you propose be done?
I never said it has anything to do with current leadership. I said their ancestors shouldn’t have made it on a lake. It’s not like they would have known millions of people would be living there. It’s was a halfhearted joke to warn potential city builders to not build a city in the middle of the lake.
Living in the middle of a lake sounds pretty cool. 22 million people, less so.