50% of Acapulco Without Water
The tourism area of Acapulco is expected to have an erratic water supply for several more days because the 48” pipe coming from the Papagayo II water treatment plant has ruptured again. “Everyone will have to be patient for about four more days while they repair it,” said Rigoberto Félix Díaz, the director of COPAMA, Acapulco’s embattled water authority. This time the culprit was Cocomex, a construction contractor working for SCT (the Federal Highway Department) on the resurfacing of the road to Cayaco. The city is expected to lose $700,000 pesos in revenue, to say nothing of the consternation of the populace.
The 48” pipe carries two cubic meters of water per second and represents almost 70% of COPAMA’s supply to the city. Half of Acapulco’s almost 300 neighborhoods are without water. Originally the problem was to be repaired in three days, but it now looks like it will take up to a week to repair. The main areas affected are on the west side of town (Las Playas and Jardines to El Cayaco) and in the upland and outlying communities of Rena, Zapata, Colosso, Morelos, Fovisste, Colosio and Llano Largo. The government has ordered the delivery of water to these areas by tanker truck.
COPAMA has also detected discharges of sewage, along with “red pockets” of pollution in the Sabana River and Papagayo Lagoon, due to the accumulation of garbage and illegal dumping of sewage. Some housing projects do not even have treatment facilities, and discharge raw sewage right into the aquifers, further taxing the fragile system. As yet, it is not known how much grey water is burdening the water treatment process.
