For the past 10 days, drilling has been carried out in the city of Montevideo in search of groundwater due to the severe drought that plagues Uruguay.
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Arballo is in Parque Batlle, a green enclave of about 60 hectares, surrounded by avenues with intense traffic and considered the “lung” of the Uruguayan capital.
There are notable monuments there, such as the Obelisk, and the Centenario Stadium, a soccer 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 in the southern part of Uruguay, mainly,” Arballo, director of works for the Groundwater Division of OSE, the state company that supplies water, told AFP. drinkable throughout the 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,” Arballo points out amid the noise 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’s very salty and sometimes it’s quite cloudy in color. It’s edible,” Marcelo Fernández, a 43-year-old employee at a shopping center, told AFP.
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,” Health Minister Karina Rando told the press.
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 reach reference values for THMs 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 looking forward to rain, but according to the Uruguayan Institute of Meteorology there will not be a “significant” rainfall event until June 19.
Arballo acknowledges that the rain will be “a relief”, but that does not prevent the work to obtain underground water from continuing. “The drilling campaign continues,” he says.
