Even with the rains hitting part of the interior of São Paulo, the City of Bauru decreed a state of emergency this Friday (12) due to the water crisis. The city, with 380 thousand inhabitants, has 40% of its residents on a rationing system, with tap water only once every four days.
The Batalha river catchment pond is practically dry. With a historical average of 136 millimeters of rain in November, in the first 11 days of this month, not a drop of water fell in the city.
The decree signed by Mayor Suéllen Rosim (Patriot) will be published this Saturday. “As a measure of coping with this difficult period, I declared a state of emergency due to water scarcity. With this measure, we are going to accelerate immediate actions to put water in the homes of those who need it, in the coming days”, he said.
Among the measures planned is an increase in the fleet of water trucks to carry water from wells directly to the reservoirs that supply the neighborhoods. The decree authorizes the Department of Water and Sewage (DAE) to withdraw water from private wells.
The mayor informed that wells are being drilled to supplement the supply. The objective is to reduce dependence on the Batalha river, which has been losing flow in recent years. When the supply rotation started in April, the level of the lake supplied by the river was 2.08 m.
Even with the rationing and rains in September and October, the level dropped even further, reaching 1.95 m this Friday. According to the DAE, if it doesn’t rain, it may be necessary to tighten the rationing even further. With the current inflow of water, the lagoon has a capacity for just two days of full operation, until it dries up.
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With scarce and poorly distributed rains, other cities in the interior have their supply compromised. In Valinhos, the Department of Water and Sewage maintained rationing due to the low rate of rainfall that did not allow for the recovery of the water sources that supply the city.
The municipality of São José da Bela Vista also maintained rationing, despite the improvement in the conditions of the dam that supplies the city. Residents of Santa Cruz das Palmeiras have only a partial supply.
Monitoring carried out by the Consortium of the Basins of the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiaí Rivers (PCJ) shows that the rivers in the region are at a level similar to that of the 2014/15 water crisis.
This Friday, the Piracicaba river, one of the main ones in the interior, had a flow of 14.24 meters per second, when the expected rate would be 81.64 m3/s. The water level in the center of the city was 0.87 meters, almost half the historical average in November of 1.67 meters. The last rain in the city was on the 1st of this month, of just 3.75 millimeters.
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The Cantareira System, which supplies 7.6 million people in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, became aware of a water shortage on August 13, when it operated at 39% of its capacity, according to data from the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo. Paulo (Sabesp).
The expected rains have not yet come and in October, the system entered a restriction level. This Friday, the system operated at 27.3% of capacity. This month, it rained just 32.5 mm in the region of the dams, still far from the historic November average of 149 mm. According to Sabesp, there is no risk of shortages because other production systems, with more water, are interconnected.
Due to the water crisis, the Department of Water and Electric Energy (Daee) opened a tender, on Thursday (12), for the drilling of 141 deep wells in 125 São Paulo municipalities not served by Sabesp.
The process calls for hiring an engineering company to perform the service within a period of six months. The drilling of wells should serve 2.1 million inhabitants. Each well will have a metallic reservoir with a capacity for up to 200 thousand liters of water. Delivery should take place in the first half of 2022.
Reference: CNN Brasil
