Every morning, Sebastián Ciliurczuk opened the tap in his Montevideo house to boil the water for the mate.
45 days ago, this 41-year-old accountant had to change that habit and heat a liter of bottled water for the traditional infusion of the Southern Cone.
Like him, hundreds of thousands of Uruguayans stopped drinking tap water Or use it to prepare your drinks.
The quality of running water in the Uruguayan capital and nearby cities has worsened throughout the year due to one of the reservoirs that provides water to the south of the country dried up due to lack of rain Since the main freshwater reserve of that region -the Paso Severino reservoir, located 80 kilometers north of Montevideo-, practically sold out.
This week it was at just 3% of capacity, having dipped as low as 1.7% in early July.
A country that looks towards the widest river in the world and that believed that its water reserves were infinite finds itself faced with the worst drought since it has records 74 years ago, and its consequences are not only seen in agricultural production, but also in the day to day of more than a half of its 3.5 million inhabitants.
Uruguay, which was the first country in the world to include in its Constitution that access to drinking water is a fundamental human right, now finds it difficult to comply with what its constitution mandates.
Salt water in the faucet
The center-right government of Luis Lacalle Pou was confident that the scarcity of water it would be solved with the rainsbut these did not arrive.
“(It was acted on) thinking that it was a temporary matter and that the rains were coming”, declared in mid-May the Vice Minister of the Environment, Gerardo Amarilla, in an interview with the local channel 12.
When asked if that was the reason why an expense had not been made before to transfer water from another river to the basin that feeds the capital’s supply, the official acknowledged that it was.
At that time, the government adopted transitory measures -for 45 days- to relax piped water quality requirements.
“Let’s hope they don’t have to be extended,” Lacalle Pou said on that occasion.
70 days later, the water quality has not improved.
With a meager amount of fresh water in the Paso Severino reservoir, the government authorized on April 26 that the state-owned national water supply company (OSE) use water from the Silver riverwhich has one higher concentration of salt and chlorideand mix it with the other stocks.
A week later, the government allowed the sodium to chloride ratio to be even higher in the water, which authorities say is “fit for human consumption”
With these provisions, Uruguay made sure that the water did not stop coming out when the tap was opened.
Despite this, the water that comes out of the tap today in Montevideo may have, according to government authorization, more than double the sodium and almost triple the chloride against the maximum values of the definition of potability of the South American country.
Some days, however, those new ceilings were exceeded, according to official records.
Water also contains a greater amount of trihalomethanes, chemical compounds that form in the liquid when it is treated with chlorine for disinfection.
Faced with the worsening of the water crisis, the government declared the water emergency on June 19, and adopted a series of extraordinary measures, such as the construction of an emergency dam and a temporary dam, the purchase of a desalination machine, or the installation of a pipeline some 13 kilometers long to carry water from another river to the water treatment plant.
Investments postponed over and over again
The immediate cause of the critical water situation in southern Uruguay is the lack of rain.
In the last three and a half years it rained 25% less than the historical average, and if only the first semester of 2023 is considered, the decrease was 43% compared to the mean.
The lack of rainfall in the south of the country is even greater and, according to the Uruguayan Institute of Meteorology, “the current period is the driest” since 1947.
But the experts consulted by BBC Mundo consider that the current emergency situation was also reached due to the lack of foresight of the successive Uruguayan governments.
The Paso Severino reservoir was inaugurated in October 1987 and was the last great work carried out by Uruguay to increase the capacity of water supply.
Its construction had been arranged after a study carried out in 1970, which recommended several additional measures to be adopted, such as the construction of another dam in the town of Casupá, 110 kilometers from Montevideo, to have a second large-flow reservoir.
The completion of a second work for the water supply went postponing government after government.
Five episodes of drought in the 1990s and 2000s brought the issue back to the fore intermittently, but as these crises were not severe enough to affect the supply of drinking water, investment soon fell behind again.
In 2013 and after the appearance of cyanobacteria in the water, the Uruguayan government said that a new reservoir should be built; a year later he announced the start of the Casupá project.
Time passed, President José Mujica handed over the band to his left-wing partner Tabaré Vázquez and, almost at the end of his term, in December 2019, the former president presented the preliminary studies for the Lacalle Pou government to begin construction of the reservoir. .
The project established a work schedule with completion in June 2024 and required an investment of US$100 million.
another project
The government of Lacalle Pou decided to go another way at the proposal of an investment group from build a water treatment plant in the coastal town of Arazatí, west of Montevideo, to take water from the Río de la Plata at a cost of about US$280 million plus interest, to be paid in 20 years.
This made the public discussion about the solution politicized and currently the opposition parties defend the Casupá project, while the pro-government supporters support the initiative on the Uruguayan coast.
Even government officials have come out to declare that keep drinking tap waterwhile opponents claim that it cannot be used for almost anything.
“Suppose that (…) we had decided on the Casupá dam, (…) we would have done everything right and in November it would have been finished; that dam [hoy] I had no water,” Lacalle Pou said at a press conference in May.
“What did the government decide?” asked the president, and he answered: “An inexhaustible source of water such as the Arazatí project, which takes water from the Río de la Plata.”
The head of state said that the project left to him by the previous government is not ruled out.
The general manager of OSE affirmed some time later that the two projects should be carried out. “You have to do Arazatí as soon as possible and you also have to do Casupá,” he said.
“Total lack of foresight”
For the director of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, Daniel Panario, there was a “total lack of foresight.”
“We strongly believe that nothing ever happens here,” he tells BBC Mundo.
Panario, who is also a doctor in environmental technology and water management, understands that in order for this crisis to have been avoided, they should have invested in time in both the generation of a new source of water like in the plumbing repair.
In Uruguay, half of the water transported by OSE is lost, while the average for developing countries leaks are 35%, according to the World Bank.
The different governments decided that it was cheaper to make water drinkable than to fix pipes”, it states.
Regarding the dichotomy of what should be the new source of water resources for the south of the country, Panario maintains that “it could not be either of the two” projects under discussion, but that the one that is most appropriate is that of Casupá because it supposes a lower cost.
The expert also warns that in the past the distribution of running water in the south of the country was decentralized in various local sources, and that over the decades the dependent unification of a single basin aggravated the current crisis.
Diego Berger, a doctor in environmental engineering and water resources administration, agrees that access to drinking water in Uruguay was something that was taken for granted and that lacked planning.
“You have to understand that it is a finite good and that in the future there will be more fluctuations, more years of drought and more years of flooding,” he told BBC Mundo.
“No presidency is going to see the fruits [de planificar e invertir] in their government because water policies imply working in the long term, and in many places they don’t want to do it because it transcends the administration”, he adds.
Berger is the coordinator of special projects abroad for the Israeli water company Mekorot, which was hired by OSE before this crisis for consulting.
Last year, interviewed by local media, Berger said it was a “miracle” that southern Uruguay had “water every day.” days” because it depended on a single source of supply.
The specialist believes that the best thing to do is to build the water treatment plant on the Río de la Plata first, to secure a second source of waterand that the Casupá project be developed in a second stage, because it depends on the same basin that was affected in these years.
Berger also thinks that it is necessary to educate the population about water consumption.
According to a report from the Ministry of the Environment published on July 7 that includes weather forecasts and projections based on different models, normality in the basin that feeds the supply to the south of the country could be reached in December.
The rains of recent days have done little to solve the water crisis that Uruguay is experiencing, a country that will have to seek long-term solutions to avoid the dreaded “zero day” in which it runs out of water.
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See original article on BBC