The president of Uruguay, Luis Calle Pou, decreed a water emergency in the country due to the drought they are going through, the hardest in 70 years.
According to authorities, they have little more than 1% of water suitable for consumption left, because the last great freshwater reserve in the capital has less than 2% availability.
The government estimates that there are between a week and ten days of drinking water left unless there is heavy rain – which is not forecast – the newspaper El País reported on Tuesday.
The authorities have already set off the alarms and indicated that they must resort to water from the Río de la Plata, which has high levels of sodium and chloride. The president assured that he is working to expedite the authorities’ response to the drinking water supply crisis, the result of the historic decline in the South American country’s main freshwater reservoir.
The Head of State has said in recent days that they will guarantee “the supply of water”, but not the quality, since he has assumed that the chloride and sodium figures will “surely” rise in the water that continues to arrive in Montevideo.
Shortage of bottled water
With the water emergency in the capital and the metropolitan area of Montevideo, where more than half of the Uruguayan population lives, bottled mineral water is thus exempt from taxes for the time being. The population with fewer resources also receives at least two liters of water a day for free.
Massive purchases have been unleashed in supermarkets. Bottled water is selling three times as fast as usual, and six-litre jugs of drinking water are like gold.