Florence Casssassuce explains to me that the main difference between tap water in the United States and tap water in Mexico is that the city only has enough plumbing pressure to provide water for a couple hours a day to one particular neighborhood at a time. People take advantage of this pumping to store water in a personal, 200-gallon rooftop tank. The issue with drinking tap water in Mexico is storage contamination. Even though the tap water may be relatively clean and chlorinated, storage tanks may be full of algae, and you can’t reach inside to clean them.
Flor is the director of Instituto EOZ de Technologias Rurale, a company she recently started after developing a point-of-use ultra violet light disinfection system for drinking water. During the past five years, she’s worked on this technology and on distributing it to rural communities of Baja.
There is one more significant problem with Baja water, and that is salt. “We have the same problem as Australia or the same as most arid land with volcanic rock,” Flor explains. “There is very high salinity – won’t pass US EPA drinking standards – from aquifer intrusion.” There are health problems associated with drinking water containing too much salt. Many people drinking salty water in Baja, especially in the rural communities that don’t have reverse osmosis purificadoras, develop kidney stones over several years that require surgery.
For this reason, Flor chooses to buy 5-gallon jugs of water from a family-run purificadora in La Paz for her drinking water at home and in the office. Her tap water, from a 200-gallon rooftop tank, she uses for washing dishes, showering, and other household chores. She places a bucket under her kitchen sink to capture used water and recycles this water for her plants.
Adrian Schalkwijk, an industrial designer from Mexico City who is now working in La Paz to develop Flor’s next UV system prototype, lives on a ranch outside La Paz city limits. In his house, Adrian explains, water is delivered by truck to his cistern, which he then pumps to a rooftop tank and flows through his tap. He doesn’t drink water directly from his tap – he filters it through a Primag filter, a home system containing sand, clay, and colloidal silver. At his office, water is from the 5-gallon blue jugs.
David Vasquez, Adrian’s former student and current product-design colleague, says he has no water filter at home, so he drinks only from the 5-gallon jugs.
