Smelly sewage floods out thousands in Mexico City
Date: 06-Jun-00
Country: MEXICO
Officials said that more than 6,000 people were flooded out of their homes, but emergency shelters in the working-class neighbourhoods of the Chalco valley were only half full because fear of looters kept people on their roofs, risking disease.
Authorities struggled to rebuild three broken spots in the dike of the nearby sewage canal. As the flood persisted, victims blamed local and state officials for failing to build proper drainage and sewage systems.
Chalco is on the edge of the greater urban area of 20 million people that includes Mexico City, but it has its own municipal president, and is inside the state of Mexico but outside of the Federal District that governs the capital.
Water supply and sewage treatment are chronic environmental problems in this enormous urban area, where rivers of sewage flow slowly through many neighbourhoods, especially in poor areas in the north and east of the Mexico valley.
Raul Ramirez, who was flooded out of his house, said he blamed the problem "on the negligence of local and state authorities, since all of them knew the canal wall was cracked."
"We had told them, but they leave everything for tomorrow, tomorrow," Ramirez told Cronica newspaper.
"For years we've been asking them to put the sewage canal into pipes and they never did. This is the consequence," Concepcion Cruz Martinez, who is flooded out of her home, told Cronica.
Cruz Martinez and others said the streets of some neighbourhoods in Chalco were littered with miles of cement sewage pipes that never were installed and connected underground.
In other areas, they said, existing sewage systems were blocked and easily overflowed because of a chronic lack of maintenance.
