() The president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, announced this Monday at a press conference that he had decreed a “water emergency for the metropolitan area” of Montevideo in order to help control the drinking water supply crisis in the capital.
The main freshwater reservoir that feeds more than 60% of the country’s population is at record lows, and this has led the state-owned company Obras Sanitarias del Estado (OSE) to carry out a different mixture of water for almost four weeks. available. That means taking a part of the water from a source closer to the Río de la Plata: an estuary that receives salty oceanic waters.
For this reason, the water that flows through the pipes of the capital of Uruguay has, in addition to a salty taste, a high level of chlorides, sodium and trihalomethanes, for which the Ministry of Public Health issued care warnings for hypertensive people, people with heart failure and kidney failure, as well as recommending short showers to avoid ingesting too many trihalomethanes through the steam.
At the conference, Lacalle Pou assured that “the water supply is guaranteed”, but warned that “the figures” of chloride and sodium in the water that, according to sanitary criteria, may not be considered drinkable, “will surely rise.”
Therefore, within the water emergency decree, the government decided to exempt taxes on bottled water to try to lower its price. “Because of this tax exemption, we assume that the price has to go down. Without the taxes that are charged there should be a noticeable drop,” he said.
The president explained that the declaration of a water emergency “enables faster and easier legal processes.”
