Pedro Camarena was standing inside a hole in the ground big enough to bury his full-size pickup truck. It was a late April afternoon in the middle of Mexico City, and the metropolis was on the cusp of its rainy season.
In a few weeks, the past eight bone-dry monthsβso parched that unaccustomed visitors often get nosebleedsβwould give way to four months of deluge. At the bottom of the hole, a ripple of black, porous rock told a story of magma once in motion.
Beside the ripple, a bulb of lava rock marked a spot where magma flow may have hit water, formed a bubble, and hardened just as it was set to pop, a spectacular moment of generative violence. The hole is a sort of time portal to roughly 1, years ago, when waves of lava from the nearby Xitle volcano coursed over this plateau.
He stood in his hole and beamed. In Mexico City, many sections of the million-person metropolis have no reliable running water. The hole, Camarena believes, is where experts will find an answer to this crisis. The city was built on bad choices, given it sits on an unstable crust of clay and a swath of lava rock. Cape Town, and Mexico City? The water crisis in Mexico City, like the water crises in many cities, is a story of epic multigenerational mismanagement. The national government allegedly ignored the experts, failing to curtail the use of agricultural water as the drought set in.
The city government, meanwhile, failed to invest in necessary water-security projects, balking at their cost. In Mexico City, the problem goes back to some of very first decisions made by Spanish invaders in the s.
