Tijuana Often Left High and Dry by Antiquated Water System

Every night, the sounds come.

First the sputtering of pipes, then the splatter of running water. And even though it’s 1 a.m., the sounds are reassuring to Tijuana housewife Diana Luna--they mean her family will have water that day.

Knowing that she will not get another chance, Luna climbs out of bed and, for the next hour or so, captures every drop of water she can in an assortment of jugs, buckets and washtubs.

Luna is lucky to get any water out of her faucet, even if it’s only for an hour a night. Despite the construction of several water projects over the last decade, many parts of Tijuana are left without tap water for days or weeks when a main ruptures or when the water is more desperately needed elsewhere.

Water problems are not new to Tijuana, which is located in one of the most arid parts of Mexico. But the problem this summer is different from that of summers past, said Manuel Becerra Lizardi, superintendent of public services for the city. “Before, we didn’t have enough water,” Becerra said. “Now, the water is there, but we’ve got no way to get it up to the people in the hills--we don’t have enough pipes.”

Most residents of the Mexican border city still get their water for cleaning and bathing from an army of aging, oddly shaped trucks, which noisily clamber up into the far reaches of Tijuana’s dusty hills and canyons.

The trucks are not nearly as reliable as Diana Luna’s nightly waterfall. Many people have had underground tanks and water pumps installed outside their houses to reduce their vulnerability to a truck driver’s whim.

“Oh, I went three weeks without water a little while ago,” said Maria Graciela Ruiz, 49, standing outside her modest house in Tijuana’s hilly Colonia El Mirador. She had just paid 450 pesos (about $1.40) to the driver of a water truck operated by the CNOP--an umbrella organization of groups supporting Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI--for three rusty barrels of water. “If you don’t buy from them every day, they pass you by. So I borrowed a little bit from this neighbor, a little bit from that one.”

Tijuana’s Public Services Commission also owns water trucks that distribute the precious liquid free of charge, but their appearances are rare indeed.

“It’s been two or three months since I’ve seen a city truck,” said El Mirador resident Maria de Jesus Rodriguez, 60, who buys three barrels of water a day for her household of six people--even though the house is connected to the city’s plumbing system. “It’s still not enough--sometimes we have to go down into the city and pay to take a bath.”

The entrance to another hilly neighborhood, which overlooks the verdant golf course of the local country club, is graced by a large fountain. There is no shortage of water here. “Only on very rare occasions, when they have to repair a pipe or something like that, is our water service interrupted,” said Dr. Jose Vasquez Castellanos, 44.

Currently, the city serves about 76,000 households and businesses--leaving between one-third and one-half the city’s residents to find water by other means, according to official sources. A $91-million water and sewage project, financed jointly by the Mexican government and the Inter-American Development Bank, should bring tap water to a good part of the rest by 1989, said Luis Manuel Serrano, spokesman for Tijuana Mayor Rene Trevino Arredondo.

The project includes the construction of 10 reservoirs, 20 miles of new water mains and 60 miles of new pipes that will serve mostly poorer neighborhoods, Becerra said.

City officials think the project will move them even further from the memory of the 1970s, when Tijuana sometimes had to import as much as 10 million cubic meters of water a year from the Otay Water District in south San Diego County. The completion of the El Carrizo Dam and the Rio Colorado Aqueduct in 1982 gave Tijuana its first water source that did not depend on local rainfall, and the city’s dams and reservoirs are now full, Becerra says.

But Tijuana’s antiquated network of water mains and pipes breaks down regularly, and construction of new pipelines has been unable to keep pace as Tijuana has sprawled into the surrounding hills and canyons.

Over the last 10 years, the city’s population--officially 719,000--has nearly doubled, and it continues to grow at 8% annually. Migrants from other parts of Mexico, illegal aliens deported from the United States and refugees from Central America account for 70% of the growth, Serrano said.

“The city has grown too rapidly, and in a disorderly way,” Becerra said. “A group of people will go up into the hills, and when their community is large enough, they come to us and demand water. Unfortunately, we can’t make a big effort and use a lot of our resources to bring water up to these people who have nothing.”

Not all of them want it. Antelmo Villa Andrade, 39, lives with his wife, mother-in-law and three children in a one-room house tucked into a short, steep dirt canyon road in the Manuel Paredes slum. “I’ve got plenty of water--the truck comes up here every day,” Villa said. “What I want to know is, when am I going to get my electricity? They said it would be here a year ago.”