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.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Good morning.
NINA KRAVINSKY: Good morning, Sam. Thanks for having me.
DINGMAN: Absolutely, thank you for joining us and thank you for your work on this really interesting series. I wanted to start with actually the way it opens, which is you take us to a park where a lot of people have crowded into a very limited amount of shade. Tell us why you started there.
KRAVINSKY: Yeah, I started there, because this park is a sort of a pillar project by the state government, actually. You know, as Hermosillo is growing and growing, a lot of that growth is going out sort of into the desert, it's expanding outwards instead of expanding upwards, sort of exacerbating a lot of this urban heat island effect that I know that, you know, folks in in Phoenix deal with too.
DINGMAN: Sounds familiar.
KRAVINSKY: Totally. And so, you know, spaces like this park are really important and they're, you know, people are crowded under the shade by this little lake. There's ducks. It's pretty idyllic, but it sort of feels like an oasis, right, in this big sprawling kind of concrete city. And you know, I think more and more there's a recognition here in Hermosillo that, you know, planting native plants and sort of like, you know, propagating spaces like this is really important. And so that's why I went out to talk to folks in this park.
DINGMAN: So one of the things that was really interesting to me about this chapter, if you will, in the series that you did is in addition to being a story about water, of course, it's also a story about growth, and Hermosillo is growing at an extremely rapid rate as you report in the story, faster maybe than even Phoenix.
KRAVINSKY: Yeah, you know, it's hard to say definitely to totally compare them. But Hermosillo between 2010 and 2020, within those 10 years grew 20%. That's almost double the amount that Phoenix grew in that same time. So it's growing really fast, and, you know, the population is now pretty well over 900,000, probably closer to a million at this point. And, you know, it's, it's just this big, growing city that has, you know, a lot of the same growing pains, as you said, Phoenix does.
DINGMAN: Yes, well, let's talk about some of those growing pains. One of the things that's happening is it's exposing some difficulties that the urban infrastructure is having in keeping track of the water. And in another section of your series, you talk about this social media campaign that the city has undertaken. Tell us about, about that social media campaign.
KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so the city has this campaign called CUIDA that is partially an educational campaign, you know, they're getting out into the schools, they're posting on social media. They're trying to sort of educate people about how to conserve household water. That's really important, Sam, because Hermosillo has a good amount of water that comes into the system, but almost 50% of that water is unaccounted for once it gets into the system. So some of it evaporates, you know, this is a big, hot, dry city. So there's a lot of evaporation that happens from the water in the city systems, from its dams and reservoirs.
But also a good proportion of the water that's unaccounted for is lost through inefficiencies in the system. So leaky municipal pipes, but also Leaky household pipes. And that's a big issue because well almost half of the city's residents, somewhere around half of the city's water users don't have a water meter. So that means they pay this flat rate for water instead of paying for the water based on how much they use. So there isn't a huge incentive to save water at home.
And, you know, a family might not even know that like, you know, they have a big leak in their house or their toilet is running 24/7 if they're paying a flat rate for water. So a lot of water is lost that way. So the city is really trying to correct for that now. They've gotten 11,000 more households and businesses into the water meter program just this year. You know, they're, they're going door to door to try to get people water meters and try to teach people how to conserve water at home and what to do if they have a big leak.
So the city is sort of trying to correct for this issue in a way that might seem small, but, you know, water officials and water management experts in Hermosillo say it's a really good way to start sort of accounting for a lot of the water waste that happens in the city.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and, and with that much water unaccounted for, you've got to start somewhere, Well, lastly, Nina, there's also the impact that all of this has on the more rural and agrarian communities surrounding Hermosillo and in the last installment of your series, you take us to a small community called Banámichi, and among other people we meet a farmer whose family is facing the prospect of potentially losing their family's farm. Why is that happening?
KRAVINSKY: Yeah, so there's a couple things happening here, Sam. Drought is impacting everyone, but it's especially impacting farmers and ranchers. You know, ranching is pretty water intensive and, and, Francisco Maldonado, who's a rancher in Banámichi, also grows alfalfa, like a lot of the farmers around that area do, and that's water intensive. And so he hasn't been able to have the water that he needs these past couple of years of pretty intense drought here in Sonora.
And so he's looking at the prospect of potentially selling his farm. That's even before this project that he's really worried about. The state and federal officials are planning to dam up the river, just about 10 miles north of Banámichi. That project is sort of aimed at keeping a water supply, state officials say for these towns, small agrarian towns on the Rio Sonora, but also really designed to bring water into growing dry Hermosillo. And people in this town are really really worried that this dam is going to leave them without water. You know, Francisco Maldonado said he's already facing the prospect of potentially having to sell his farm, and this dam project makes that possibility even more real for him.
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