“Plan B” due to drought in Uruguay: they drill in the capital’s park in search of water

“You always have to have a plan B,” says Valeria Arballo, a geologist who supervises the drilling that has been carried out for ten days in the heart of the city of Montevideo in search of underground water due to the severe drought that hits Uruguay.

Arballo is in Parque Batlle, a green enclave of about 60 hectares, surrounded by avenues with intense traffic and considered the “lungs” of the Uruguayan capital.

There are notable monuments there, such as the Obelisk, and the Centenario Stadium, a football temple built in 1930 for the first World Cup in history. Now there are also heavy machinery to extract fresh water capable of supplying hospitals and schools.

“Drilling is being done in the city of Montevideo due to the water crisis that is experienced in the southern zone, mainly in Uruguay”explains Arballo, works director of the OSE Groundwater Division, the state company that supplies drinking water to the entire country.

Two wells, 90 and 42 meters deep, are already ready. OSE authorities revealed that the water found is suitable for human consumption, once filtered and made drinkable.

OSE’s water for the capital and the metropolitan area, where some 1.8 million people live, comes from surface sources. But faced with a drought of more than three years, the worst in more than seven decades of records, OSE appealed to the subsoil.

“Montevideo is on a crystalline basement, the aquifer is fractured and then we have to find where those fractures are capable of accumulating water,” points out Arballo in the midst of the roar of the machines.

worst quality

While the wells are not operational, tanker trucks with 30,000 liters of OSE water have been arriving this week at Parque Batlle, where there is space to transfer their cargo to smaller trucks capable of distributing it to health centers and institutions that require it.

This water comes from an OSE water treatment plant in Costa Azul, in the neighboring department of Canelones, some 55 km from Montevideo.

The main source of fresh water for Montevideo and its surroundings is the Paso Severino reservoir, some 85 km north of the capital. But there the reserves have been declining for months: as of June 7 there were 4,400,000 m3 of a total of 67,000,000 m3 of capacity, according to the latest official balance.

Montevideo consumes an average of 550,000 m3 per day. “The situation continues to be very critical”OSE said.

And the water coming out of the tap changed a lot.

Given the lack of rain, since the end of April, OSE has been mixing the fresh water from Paso Severino with water from sources near the Río de la Plata, which is more brackish because it comes from the estuary.

“It is very salty and sometimes quite cloudy in color. It is undrinkable”, comments Marcelo Fernández, 43 years old and an employee in a shopping center.

The health authorities affirm that it is “safe” water. This week they extended until July 20 the maximum limits of sodium and chlorides authorized in the water that OSE distributes in Montevideo and surrounding towns, already exceptionally increased twice.

They also allowed for a temporary increase in trihalomethanes (THMs), chemicals that are formed during chlorine disinfection and are harmful if consumed over decades.

“It is absolutely certain that for 45 days the increase in THMs does not cause any harm to health”declared to the press the Minister of Health, Karina Rando.

The latest official report on the quality of drinking water in the metropolitan area, which runs from January to May, reports the increase in these compounds.

But he stresses that the World Health Organization points out that “Attempts to achieve THM reference values ​​should never prevent adequate disinfection.”

More sales

This water crisis “is something urgent to solve, especially for people who do not have the resources to buy bottled water,” says Romina Maciel, a 33-year-old history student.

In Montevideo and Canelones, where a 6.25-liter drum of water is available for 130 pesos (about $3.4), bottled water consumption skyrocketed.

Sales grew 224% in May compared to the same month of the previous year, according to a private study published this week. The greatest increase occurred in still water bottles (467%) and jerrycans (217%).

Many are anxiously awaiting rain, but according to the Uruguayan Institute of Meteorology there will not be an event “significant” of rainfall until June 19.

Arballo recognizes that the rain will be “A relief”but that does not prevent the work to obtain underground water from continuing. “The drilling campaign continues”says.

Source: AFP