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mexico city drainage issues

Tags: mexico

Mexico city is sinking and having floods

Engineers like Nabor Carillo understood the sinking was not natural, the rapidly growing city had extracted so much groundwater using mechanical pumps and delpleted the groundwater

Clay shrunk and the city sunk, in spite of the Grand Canal that drained the city’s lakes and allowed for expansion

Engineers after 1951 moved the groundwater wells out of the city center and towards urban periphery + deep drainage tunnels called Deep Drainage System (Sistema del Drenaje Profundo)

  • finished in 1975
  • four olympic size swimming pools of water are expelled per minute from the tunnels
  • wastewater that couldn’ve been treated is wasted
  • causing the water table to fall
  • transformed water problems from a catastropic problems to creeping one
  • present day no longer sufficient during rainy season

South and Eastern Mexico City’s wells are gone and poor residents lack adequate water service

Similarities to beirut trash riots?

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