With historically low river flows and reservoirs running dry due to drought, people in central Chile have found themselves particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic. Years of resource exploitation and lax legislation have allowed most reservoirs in that part of the country to run dry. “There are now 400,000 families, nearly 1.5 million people approximately, whose supply of 50 liters of water a day depends on tankers,” Rodrigo Mundaca, spokesman for the Movement for the Defense of Water, the Earth and the Protection of the Environment, told AFP.
One of the main pieces of advice to protect people against coronavirus is to wash your hands regularly. “Living without water is awful,” said Dilma Castillo, who lives with her children on one of the hills around El Melon, a town of 22,000 close to the seaside resort of Valparaiso whose river has dried up. “The worst thing is that there’s no awareness, even among the people here. I’m very distressed because it’s humiliating to live in these conditions.”
Chilean law states that water is a resource for public use, but it turned over almost the entirety of the right to exploit the resource to the private sector. In Chile, “water is bought, sold or leased.” The general director of Waters, Oscar Cristi, says the water rights have been delivered to private companies, but the state controls those rights and can limit the amount of water kept in reservoirs. However, the state has never exercised that right and if it did, it would have to compensate the private firms affected.
Source: Phys.org
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