A situation that definitely has to be addressed to the voice of now. When we talk about the environment, a proposal that the two candidates for the Edomex elections share It is the sanitation of the Lerma river.
And it is something extremely important, something that past governments have promised and nothing else.
And it is that the situation of this river, which is one of the longest in the country, is particularly serious… how bad?
Pollution of the Lerma River
First we are going to talk about this important body of water. As we mentioned before, the Lerma River is the longest inland river in Mexico.
This body of water is born in the springs of Almoloya del Río, in the State of Mexico, and advances towards the northwest to the Valley of Toluca, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán and drains into Lake Chapala. It has a total length of 708 kilometers.
Together with the Rio Grande de Santiago, which also ends in Lake Chapala, the Lerma-Chapala-Santiago river system It is one of the most important bodies of water in the country.
In the 2012-2018 period, the National Water Quality Measurement Network (RNMCA) of the National Water Commission (Conagua) carried out an analysis of 840 sites in the Lerma Santiago Pacífico hydrological region.
Twenty-one sites were studied on the La Laja river, 44 sites on the Turbio river, 72 sites on the Santiago river (upper part), 39 sites on the Santiago river (lower part), 9 sites on the Lerma river (in Salamanca) and 35 sites in Lake Chapala.
This study, for example, analyzed 9 sites on the Lerma River that passes through Salamanca, in Guanajuato.
In all the sites they found microbiological contamination that derives excrement (fecal coliforms and Escherichia coli). 5 sites presented high toxicity with contaminants such as phosphorus, arsenic, copper, mercury, nickel, zinc, dissolved solids, aluminum, barium, boron, iron, manganese, nitrites, ammoniacal nitrogen, cyanides, fats, oils, etc.
In the same way, the quality of the water in the upper part of the Lerma river was analyzed, from its source and the part that passes through Toluca, San Mateo Atenco, San Mateo Mexicaltzingo, etc.
Of the 23 sites that were measured, 17 were contaminated by human waste and sewage. Only one site met the indicators, which does not mean that it is clean, just that it does not exceed contamination levels.
In this area, since 2010, 375 industrial discharges and effluents from more than 700 industries were detected.
The Conagua report specifies that the receiving bodies of all these discharges, with mixtures of industrial and municipal waste, are part of a network of collectors and canals that eventually end up discharging their content into the Lerma River.
Around 2017, experts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), explained that the Lerma river –at least until this date– was biologically dead.
They explained that there is no oxygen along the first 15 kilometers of the Lerma River that crosses the State of Mexico and that the rains mix with sewage. He claimed that In this section, more than 425 million cubic meters of domestic and industrial sewage are discharged every year.
What’s more, there is not a single section of the river that is 100% clean, all areas have some degree of contamination. They recently filled water bottles with liquid from the Lerma River to show the real conditions: the result is truly terrifying.
And it is just enough to analyze the numbers. The part known as the Cuenca Alta del Lerma is an area deeply contaminated by more of 500 thousand inhabitants and more than 500 industries installed in the Lerma-Toluca corridor that contaminate the body of water.
Are we going to promise to clean up the Lerma River? And how? What will be the strategies to achieve it if the sewage and industrial discharges end there?
