Short on Quantity, Quality : Baja Drinking Water: Bottled Is Safest Bet

Drinking water is a precious commodity throughout Baja California, where bottled or purified drinking water is the rule rather than the exception for residents and visitors alike.

Although the quality of water is spotty throughout the semi-arid Mexican state, the widely held belief that bad Baja water causes illness among some tourists is unfair, says Gina Cord, a spokeswoman for the Tijuana Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Every Mexican that comes to the United States gets the same dysentery that Americans get in Mexico,” she said. “The people that get sick do so because there’s a change in the (water’s) mineral content.”

Tourists need not worry about tainted water unless they are camping in remote areas of Baja California, she said.

Restaurant Precautions

“All the restaurants have purified or bottled water available,” she said. For campers, she recommended that they either take water along or purchase bottled water.

“If there’s any doubt, the best thing to do is boil it,” Cord said. In the event that a person becomes ill, she said the best cure for dysentery is red apples and red wine.

In Tijuana, the Mexican state’s largest city with a population of 1 million, residents and businesses also rely on bottled water for drinking rather than water supplied by the Public Services Commission.

The water is treated and drinkable at its point of origin, but it picks up contaminants and impurities when it is sent through antiquated pipelines in Tijuana’s water distribution system, said Manuel Becerra, a supervising engineer with the Public Services Commission.

Public water is used by residents for washing dishes, cars, clothes and themselves, and businesses use the commission water for industrial purposes.

Drinking water is purchased from about a dozen private bottled water companies, Becerra said.

He said tourists visiting Tijuana shouldn’t be concerned about the quality of water because restaurants and hotels use either bottled water or have installed filtration systems to remove impurities from water supplied by the commission, Becerra said.

Daily Tests for Quality

The commission, which oversees water distribution and runs daily tests on water quality, is trying to improve water quality by treating the water again at strategic points in the pipeline network.

“We use chlorine two or three times after the water (leaves) the treatment plant,” Becerra said.

About 65% of the residences are hooked into the commission’s water distribution network. The rest of the city’s population has no water service.

The state and federal government is working on a program to provide water service to those without it over the next four years, city officials said.