Water Part 2 – Water in Puerto Peñasco.
Water is very scarce in Puerto Peñasco, where we spend over 3 months in summer of 2016. Puerto Peñasco supplies its population of 60.000 with 6-10 city wells, depending who you are talking to, and it has one large water reservoir. Several wells were being worked on, when at the end of July a lightening storm hit working wells and broke water pipes. Bad luck and terrible for the city. The city had water stored in its reservoir, which it used during the first week, while trying to fix the damage, but couldn’t in time. And then there wasn’t any water left in the pipes. City trucks got water from the very few wells left working, which had little pressure because of over-pumping and because most of the water pipes were leaking and weren’t holding pressure anymore.
Only a select few were serviced with water by the water trucks at that time. What was left of the water was being trucked first to the tourist resorts, then to the towns people, but only the connected ones. During the first week, the inn we were staying in, got water from water trucks twice daily filling up its two tanks, the second week those trucks went elsewhere. People unsuccessfully tried to hunt down water trucks, which went straight out to the resorts and to the wealthy areas.
The citizens are used to this and help themselves. Most have water reservoirs on their roofs for these occasions, which happen frequently, several times during the year and regularly in summer. But nobody has water-makers, which could be a great solution: strap a water-maker on a truck next to a water barrel, drive down to the beach and make water in the spot. One of the beach towns is rumored to have a desalination plant. There is not much transparency, nobody knows for sure. I found plans for one on a company’s website, but don’t know if it was built. If the boat wouldn’t be on the hard in the boat yard, we could have left and made our own water. But there we were stuck on land and in this city with everyone else in that water crisis.
The tourists who come to Puerto Peñasco don’t notice any of this. The resorts have enormous water reservoirs and are being helped by the city. They bring a steady stream of cash, Peñasco is ‘the beach of Arizona’ and tourism is the main employer followed by the shrimp fishing industry. The city boomed into a tourist destination in the late nineties and the wells have trouble keeping up with the demand already at the beginning of each summer. Every year it’s the same.
How can this be, that a city triples in size without an infrastructure to support it? Development greed pure, I fear. I understand that we want to better ourselves and I applaud an enterprising spirit, but the development needs to be able to self sustain. As the world population grows and with it the need for solutions for a livable future. Positive examples generate a buzz, which does travel. The implementation lies in our hands. In Puerto Peñasco majors cannot be re-elected after one term, a measure to fight corruption, but this disrupts any continuity of city projects and the ability bring them to completion. As so many global cities, Puerto Peñasco is stuck in the twilight zone of a political catch 22 and only projects run by the Mexican government can move the city forward.
Water Series
Water Part 2 – Water in Puerto Peñasco.
Water Part 3 – Conquering the World.
