Beyond the rest of the summer days, the beach, the sun and whether the sunscreen is of good quality or not, there is an issue that is the main concern of coastal families: access to drinking water, the scarce liquid More than usual at this time of year.
Engineer Agustín Moreira, from the Observatory of Natural Phenomena, Ofena, warns about the scarcity of water for home consumption due to the decrease in aquifers, which are what provide fresh and clean water to artisanal wells.
“We are going from the phenomenon of El Niño, to Niño Neutral and Niño Neutral to Niño Seco, during the next three months and this means that we are going to have a fairly large deficit in relation to the few chances of precipitation. Now, by having a lower aquifer, the wells come to reduce their flows or volumes of water”, warns the expert.
According to Moreira, the water could present a higher level of contaminants in this period, due to the stagnation that originates in the wells, which he describes as “water without quality for human consumption.”
Families take the opportunity to clean wells
This summer time, some families take advantage of it to clean and dig their wells, but it is a minority. The vast majority have years without maintaining their aquifer sources.
“Every year we clean our well, because from there we drink and cook, after cleaning it, we add chlorine. We already know that all the waters are contaminated, but we try to keep this well clean as much as possible,” a Caribbean resident who was cleaning his family well told this report.
The engineer Moreira recommends implementing any use of water purification methods, to avoid gastrointestinal diseases. “You have to be very careful and carry out water analyzes in these wells. Appropriate treatments must be carried out, since there is no movement of water due to low aquifer flows, this means that the water loses its quality because it does not have circulation and has a type of stagnant water, ”he recalled.
Other contaminants that can affect
Something that worries experts with the same magnitude as access to quality water is the amount of garbage that is left in the streets, beaches, rivers, among other natural recreation centers.
Very few tourists materialize the concept of not throwing garbage on the ground. An immense majority have destructive behavior towards the environment, reflects the ecologist Gladys Luna.
Luna explains that contamination with solid waste (garbage) affects the largest natural resource: the soil. These contaminants in turn end up in lagoons, rivers, pipes and any aquifer ecosystem. “The decomposition of the waste generates gases that are released into the atmosphere, and cause air pollution, but other waste also contaminates the soil,” she points out.
“It is important to say that the mismanagement of waste contaminates all ecosystems, since they are all interconnected, so when a waste is generated in one part of the system, at a specific point, this waste travels through the ecosystems that they are interconnected,” explained Luna.
A practice that the ecologist recommends is to avoid using plastics on these summer vacations or to reduce the use of it, since the greatest reflection of human passage through the beaches and rivers is the garbage left by visitors.
