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The country’s main urban centers flood during the rainy season. I remember one in the City with Angel, as Professor Carlos Hank called it during his government. The media showed work crews busily cleaning the drains and ducts in the flooded areas. The columnist Manuel Buendía, the most widely read and respected of that time, reminded Hank that the cleanup work had to be done during the dry season. The official response was that it rained like never before.
Yes, that is what the governors of Mexico City, the municipalities that surround it and other cities repeat. We knew well in advance that this year it would rain a lot because we will have numerous hurricanes and storms. However, the minimum measures were not taken to avoid flooding as much as possible. For those of us who live in the basin of Mexico, every year the water reminds us that it has memory, that the megacity of 30 million inhabitants is on what was once a lake region, with 45 rivers and hundreds of streams that carried rainwater from the upper parts of the basin that was not able to filter and feed the water table through agricultural and forested areas. Forty-three rivers were piped to build avenues for vehicular traffic.
It is the only city on the planet that, instead of preserving its rivers to obtain the water that its inhabitants need and regulate the climate, they disappear and turn them into depositaries of the sewage from residential areas and economic activities. At the same time, it allows ravines and streams to be covered to build all kinds of housing.
Without any planning, the asphalt stain has spread over the reserve areas over the last 70 years. Invaders have played a key role in this task, taking advantage of the thousands of families in need of a place to live. Once an area is invaded, public transport arrives, followed by services and regularisation in exchange for votes in elections. A classic example: Chalco, which encouraged new irregular settlements in the surrounding areas, which are very fragile, and now suffer flooding every year.
I add a voracious real estate sector that, with the support of corrupt and/or inept officials, builds condominiums and subdivisions in high-risk areas and without adequate services to collect rainwater and sewage. Officials also allow the ravines and streams of the basin to be blocked with various garbage to build housing. The most recent case of invasion: Anzaldo, in Magdalena Contreras, where the San Jerónimo River flows.
Two days before leaving office, President Felipe Calderón inaugurated in Ecatepec the first 10 kilometers of the 62 kilometers of the Eastern Emission Tunnel (TEO) and the El Caracol pumping plant, both intended to prevent catastrophic and/or minor flooding in the capital of the country and the state of Mexico. The floods continued, as did the construction of the rescue project. After 11 years of work, President López Obrador inaugurated it in its entirety on December 24, 2019. It cost 30 billion pesos. When inaugurating it, he said that it would serve to prevent serious flooding in nine municipalities of Mexico City and four municipalities of the state of Mexico; in addition, to recharge the overexploited aquifers of the metropolitan area.
The TEO begins in the Gustavo A. Madero municipality, at the confluence of the Gran Canal del Desagüe with the Remedios River. It discharges into the municipality of Atotonilco de Tula, Hidalgo, where the Wastewater Treatment Plant is located. This cleans much of the water that reaches it. The rest of the liquid would be used by farmers in the Mezquital Valley. But it is a source of contamination and diseases for the populations in the area.
A pharaonic project that does not prevent flooding in that region and in many others in the basin. Recently, a large-scale flood occurred in Tula, where the wastewater treatment plant is located. And also, through the TEO, the rainwater that we should retain for the needs of the population and the economy goes to the sea, contaminated. The abundant hurricanes and cyclones are not the main culprits of what is happening. There are others, as I will mention on Monday.
