The water running through the pipes in hot, dry and growing Hermosillo is precious. Around half of it goes unaccounted for.
As a pivotal rainy season nears, critics are calling for the desert city’s water utility to address the inefficiency. If the city suffers its third straight rainy season without enough rain, its water supply would dwindle even further.
“Either we get good water management to become sustainable, or we’re not sustainable at all and this city is … doomed,” said Nicolás Pineda, a Colegio de Sonora researcher who specializes in urban water management.
The city’s water utility wants to avoid a doomsday scenario. It has ramped up measures to figure out where that unaccounted-for water is going, as it adds new wells to its system. But as surface water continues to dry up and aquifers deplete, the Sonoran capital has limited options to quench the thirst of a growing population.
Currently, the city is working with about 25% less water than usual, said Paty Ríos, spokesperson for the water utility Agua de Hermosillo.
“At this moment, we in Hermosillo are living in an extraordinary situation,” Ríos said.
Hydrologists and meteorologists agree the situation is dire. For more than a decade, the region hasn’t gotten the amount of water it needs to recharge its underground aquifers, scientists say. The lack of rain leaves riverbeds and reservoirs dry, too.
Those water sources typically replenish during rainy seasons, but the past two rainy seasons have yielded around half the rain Hermosillo usually gets.
“It’s like a double whammy,” said Arizona State University hydrology professor Enrique Vivoni, who’s studied the Río Sonora watershed for years. “Two seasons back to back where one would expect precipitation to help alleviate the drought have failed. And thus the drought situation has worsened considerably.”
If the situation continues to get worse, it will strain the city’s water system even further, said Pineda, the Colegio de Sonora professor. That’s why he’s calling on the city to better use and conserve the water it does have, starting with getting households and businesses to fix their leaks and better monitor their usage.
It isn’t an easy problem to fix. Around half of water users in Hermosillo don’t have a water meter, according to the city’s water utility.
That means the city can’t track their water usage, so they can’t charge them more if they’re heavy users. Instead, those residents pay a flat-rate fee, giving them little incentive to close their faucets and check for leaks.
Without a meter, a family’s toilet could be running around the clock, and they might not even know, Pineda said.
“If you don’t care for that because you’re going to pay the same amount every month no matter what, you don’t have a hurry to fix that leak,” Pineda said.
Getting more households into the city’s water metering program might seem like a drop in the bucket in the face of staggering — even existential — drought. But Pineda and other experts see it as the place to start.
The city of Hermosillo agrees. Getting more water meters to households and businesses is a major pillar of the CUIDA — meaning “care” — program, a framework the city rolled out this year to prepare its water system for more drought. So far, they’ve added 11,000 meters this year, according to Ríos, the utility spokesperson.
Utility representatives are also going out into the community — to schools and even door-to-door — to help Hermosillo residents learn how to save water. Colorful videos and graphics on official Instagram pages explain the reality of drought, and suggest tips for what residents should do if they suspect they have a leak.
As it tries to account for the missing water, Agua de Hermosillo is also adding more water into the system. The utility is working on adding nearly 30 new wells to the existing 80 wells that service the municipality, Ríos said.
The CUIDA program is headed by Hermosillo Mayor Antonio Astiazarán, who’s promoted it enthusiastically since its rollout earlier this year.
“We all know that the drought is a reality,” Astiazarán said in a video on social media. “But in Hermosillo, we’ve decided not to wait.”
The city has its work cut out for it, said Juan Jaime Sánchez, a lawyer who’s long focused on water use. Hermosillo has enough water, he said, but so much is lost in the system that the city finds itself thirsty for the resource.
He wants to see Agua de Hermosillo get its rate of users with meters up from half to closer to 70%.
“I think it would notably improve the ability of [Agua de Hermosillo] to guarantee the delivery of water,” Sánchez said.
With so much of the city using water without a meter, Ríos said it’s hard to know exactly where all of Hermosillo’s missing water is ending up.
But this year’s efforts to get more households metered, and help users better understand how to conserve the precious resource, are more than just a drop in the bucket, Ríos said.
“We are on the path to bringing order to this situation, and better understand what’s happening so that we can work on it,” Ríos said.
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South of the border, in the Mexican state of Sonora, the city of Hermosillo is dealing with ongoing water shortage and the various ways it impacts all walks of life. KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky recently reported an illuminating series of stories about how drought is shaping life there, and joined The Show to discuss. -
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