Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Luis Ramirez leapt onto the roof of his bright blue water truck to fill the plastic tank that by day’s end would empty into an assortment of buckets, barrels and cisterns in 100 homes. It was barely 11 a.m. and Ramirez had many more stops to make on the hilly, grey fringes of Tijuana, a sprawling, industrial border city in northwestern Mexico where trucks or “pipas” like Ramirez’s provide the only drinking water for many people.
Research from a U of T Engineering team could help support household access to safe drinking water in low and middle-income communities by adopting solar-powered ultraviolet (UV) LED illumination to treat water in Mexico’s rainwater harvesting systems. The team includes Mistelle Haughton (CivMin MASc candidate), Karlye Wong (CivMin PhD candidate) and Professor Ron Hofmann (CivMin). Together, they are among a handful of researchers focusing on the benefits of UV LEDs for water harvesting systems.
One year after the Super Bowl season was marred by a ban on Mexican avocado shipments, another threat has emerged: An environmental complaint that avocado growers are destroying forests that provide critical habitat for monarch butterflies and other creatures. The complaint, filed with the trilateral Commission for Environmental Cooperation, part of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade accord, accuses the Mexican government of failing to enforce its own laws on deforestation, water conservation and land use.
Mexico declared the water shortage in the northern state of Nuevo Leon a matter of "national security" on Friday as the region, home to Mexico's industrial capital, has been crippled by a worsening drought in recent months. In a declaration issued Friday afternoon, the federal government said available water should be prioritized for public use, and said existing federal water concessions to private companies could be modified or reduced.
Her elderly neighbor is hard of hearing so Maria Luisa Robles, a convenience store worker in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, shouted the question a second time: Have you run out of water? She had - and it wasn't just her. The taps across this working-class neighborhood of Sierra Ventana dried up over a week ago amid a historic shortage that's gripped the most important industrial city in Mexico.
Drought conditions now cover 85 per cent of Mexico, and residents of the nation's central region said Thursday that lakes and reservoirs are simply drying up, including the country's second-largest body of fresh water. The mayor of Mexico City said the drought was the worst in 30 years, and the problem can be seen at the reservoirs that store water from other states to supply the capital. Some of them, like the Villa Victoria reservoir west of the capital, are at one-third of their normal capacity, with a month and a half to go before any significant rain is expected.
A large swath of warm water spanning thousands of kilometres from the Bering Sea to Mexico, nicknamed by scientists as “the Blob,” has returned to the West Coast, threatening marine life and fisheries. The Blob was christened in 2014, after a similar natural event that spanned two years devastated the salmon industry, damaged ecosystems and disrupted wildlife like whales, sea lions and crabs. “This is a massive pool… of warm water that’s in the Pacific, that is thousands of kilometres huge,” said senior climatologist for Environment Canada David Phillips on CTV’s Your Morning Tuesday. “This one stretches from the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, right through the Gulf of Alaska, right through to California, British Columbia, and down to Mexico.”
