2023-06-28 17:28:23
MONTEVIDEO (AP) — Disagreement over water quality has been a recurring complaint in Montevideo since two months ago it began to come out of household taps with a salty taste.
The most severe drought in Uruguay in the last 44 years, attributed mainly to the great climatic variability in the region and the lack of investment in freshwater reservoirs -the last one was in 1986-, has caused a serious water crisis whose solution “is the rain”, recently said President Luis Lacalle Pou, who decreed the water emergency last week.
The Santa Lucía River, one of the most important water courses in Uruguay, supplied fresh water to Montevideo and its area of influence for more than 150 years until the first days of May of this year. Then the authorities decided to take salt water from the Río de la Plata, which forced them to raise the allowed levels of chloride and sodium in tap water.
The most vulnerable sectors of the city experience the water crisis more severely because they cannot buy bottled water, but the brackishness of the liquid has democratized discomfort and damage. You have to bathe, wash clothes, rinse fruits and vegetables or clean with salt water that damages electrical appliances.
Enzo Vidoni, manager of a water heater factory in the capital where water heating devices are also repaired, said that before the crisis he received five or six customers a day. For a month now, 50 or 60 have arrived. “I think it is a learning experience for everyone,” he said. “We can’t play with water.”
Complaints from Montevideans for digestive ailments also increased, although doctors and health authorities assured that a direct relationship between the consumption of brackish water and the ailments manifested cannot be established.
The water “comes out more and more salty that you can’t drink it, but you’re thirsty and you have to drink,” lamented Natalia Moreira, a 33-year-old woman who claimed to suffer from stomach upset and diarrhea when she drinks tap water. “Now I have a coffee and go straight to the bathroom, before it didn’t happen to me,” she explained to The Associated Press. Her children’s stomach hurts when they drink tap water. Still, they haven’t needed to go to the doctor.
“We always drink tap water, now we drink it because it’s not enough to buy, it’s very expensive,” he complained. Moreira cannot bear the cost of bottled water for the four members of her family in Malvín Norte, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Montevideo where one in three people have some unsatisfied basic need in housing, education or services.
As a result of the crisis, the price of bottled water increased: a six-liter drum was 10% cheaper in May than in June, according to the Ministry of Economy. Scanntech, an electronic payment terminal company in stores, assured that the consumption of two-liter bottled water rose 467% compared to June 2022.
President Lacalle Pou announced last week that the quality might continue to worsen and on Tuesday he expanded to 500,000 low-income people in Montevideo and Canelones, the two departments affected by the drought, who will receive up to two liters of bottled water per day if it passes in Parliament the bill sent by the government that provides for the delivery of the liquid.
It also exempted bottled water from taxes, implying a tax loss of $10 million, and assured that the price of bottled water would be monitored, although it refused to monitor prices.
Not all Uruguayans can afford to replace tap water with bottled water. According to figures from the Cuesta Duarte Institute, there are 549,000 people in the country with incomes of less than 25,000 pesos (640 dollars) and 141,000 unemployed. One in 10 Uruguayans is below the poverty line, according to official data.
Carlos Ibarra and María Abreu stopped using tap water to drink mate, the popular South American infusion. Sitting on a narrow path at the door of their house, in the Malvín Norte neighborhood of the capital, they talked surrounded by children who are forbidden to drink tap water and their two dogs, who drink boiled tap water.
Eight people live in your home. Buying water for everyone involves 600 pesos a day, regarding 15 dollars. “It’s 18,000 pesos per month (460 dollars), it’s a salary,” the man added. His wife works in a food store and earns 20,000 pesos a month. He also suffers from stress-induced squamous dyshidrosis, a skin condition on his hands, which is why he must wash them with boiling water so they don’t swell or burn.
Two months ago, they reported, “we began to feel a strange taste in the mate. Later the children complained of stomach aches, two of them had diarrhea, me too,” said Ibarra, who collects and sells plastic bottles for recycling.
“Tap water is undrinkable, not even in mate,” he said. The bitter infusion of yerba mate does not appease the “weird”, “strange”, “like earth and salt” flavor, described by several residents of Malvín Norte, located in one of the sectors with the highest unemployment and informal economy in Montevideo.
Álvaro Sosa, 31, another resident of the area, assured that the water had already “been weird” since before they broke the news. “It has made me go to the bathroom a lot and not defecate so solid but more liquid, that worries me,” he acknowledged. The man lives with seven other people and, according to what he said, “more or less the same thing happens to all of us.”
Given the scarcity of fresh water in the largest dam in Uruguay -the Paso Severino, which holds only 3.5% of its reservoir-, the Ministry of Public Health authorized in May to double the allowed values of chloride and sodium in the water and last week the authorities announced that the values will increase once more.
Also the levels of total dissolved solids, iron and trihalomethanes -a potentially carcinogenic compound, according to the International Center for Research on Cancer-, exceeded the average values allowed by the country’s drinking water regulations.
Even so, the Ministry of Health issued a statement two weeks ago in which it assured that the water that reaches homes “is suitable for human consumption” and a source from that portfolio indicated that if there are more cases of diarrhea or digestive ailments, probably may be a virus, but not from the increase in sodium in the water.
The discussion on the adverse effects of the new water parameters is open and last Friday Arturo Briva, dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of the Republic, pointed out in a letter that “there is little evidence on acute effects from the water intake with high levels.
But he insisted that “the absence of evidence occurs in part because of the exceptional nature of the situation and should not be confused with the fact that there are no potential risks or that we have not been able to identify them.”
Dahiana Amarillo is an oncologist at the Hospital de Clínicas. Some of the therapies she runs on her involve her patients drinking up to three liters a day. “But several patients have told me: ‘Doctor, I can’t drink three liters’”.
Silvia Crosa, community nurse in charge of the INVE 16 neighborhood health center, in Malvín Norte, explained that “when the taste is unpleasant, a gastric alteration can occur, a rejection reaction. With the elevation of chlorine, people may report gastric upset or even diarrhea. It may be being generated, but we cannot take the relationship as proven in these cases.
However, he recognized that “when the discomfort is not very acute, adults put up with it” and do not go to the doctor.
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