News of Sao Paulo’s water crisis has, by now, spread far and wide. However, although the word sec (drought) is much in use, and though a severe lack of rain is one of the many factors in play, when it comes to actual shortage of water, the truth — as with almost everything else in this sprawling metropolis — is that it is complicated.
There is a wealth of water in Sao Paulo, it is just not always in the right places. As if to drive the point home, the late-afternoon rain that drenches the city most days in summer has been rare this year; yet during one recent, torrential storm, half the rain expected for the entire month of February fell in the space of just a few hours.
When the storm hit downtown Sao Paulo, the bus terminal at Praca Pedro Lessa, in the Valley of Anhangabau was quickly awash, shin-deep in water in a matter of minutes. Gushing down the hill toward it along Rua Capitao Salomao, a fast-moving current of water sent a fleet of black rubbish bags sailing down the street, straight into the back of the suddenly motionless traffic.
For some of those looking glumly from the windows of stationary buses, flooded streets awaited at home; or worse still, soaked sofas, ruined fridges and kitchen floors slick with mud. In this chronically built-up subtropical city, high-velocity runoff from the essentially impermeable surface drives storm canals to dangerous, fast-moving levels, and causes flash flooding and even landslides in some neighborhoods, even as millions grapple with the daily problem of limited or nonexistent water supplies.
Water, unsurprisingly, is a topic of ceaseless discussion, and the source of considerable collective anxiety. And for some, including a handful of well-informed amateur water-watchers, it has become a life-altering obsession.
In adventures he chronicles on his Facebook page, Existe Aqua em SP “There is water in SP”, the river hunter Adriano Sampaio is a tireless urban expeditionist, walking the city in search of lost rivers and springs, and posting a steady stream of videos to his page. He and his friend Ramon Bonzi, an urbanist, use 1930s maps laid over modern-day street maps to track down hidden and forgotten waterways, peering over walls, lifting manhole covers and climbing about in the undergrowth in search of rivers, streams and springs.
“We always find something,” Sampaio says.
Wearing his trademark Panama hat, he ranges from the city’s affluent centre-west to its immense eastern expanses — in a recent post filmed in the working-class neighborhood of Cidade Antonio Estevao de Carvalho, he shows residents fishing in a community-created lake, and reports on overgrown, neglected streams and on raw sewage infiltrating the waterways, “straight from the public sewerage system.”
On one expedition to Pirituba in the north of the city, Sampaio drank from a spring the community uses for drinking water, and became so ill that he ended up in hospital.
“It’s vital that the different springs and water sources around the city are tested and labeled,” he says, “so that people know what use each source can safely be put to.”
A self-confessed passionate amateur, Sampaio’s work follows in the expert footsteps of the project Rios e Ruas “Rivers and Roads”, created by geographer and water systems specialist Luiz de Campos and Jose Bueno, an architect. They have been mapping the city’s waterways since 2010, and also organize expeditions and weekend task forces, bringing teams of volunteers together to clean up neglected rivers and streams.
Sao Paulo has nearly 300 named waterways, says De Campos, and probably closer to 500 in total. A collective map used by Rios e Ruas shows the city looking like a vital organ, encased in a blue web of waterways — a network of mostly buried rivers and streams totaling more than 3,000km.
“There’s plenty of water in Sao Paulo,” De Campos says. “It’s just very badly managed.”
Sampaio, a lifelong nature-lover, was first inspired to action in 2013, after a chance discovery he made while walking in a small park, Praca Homero Silva, close to where he grew up in the neighborhood of Pompeia. “I noticed that the ground was muddy, and I started digging,” he says.
Within minutes, water began seeping from the earth. Sampaio dug another hole, and another, and as water sprang from the ground, he was hooked. Setting to work to channel the water from the various springs he uncovered in the park, he quietly created a small pond, without permission, at the bottom of the park; and in July 2014, with the help of friends and supporters, a second pond, right beside the first.
“We only used materials we found in the area,” he says.
The ponds took several months to fill up, but today, they are brimming with plant life in and around the water, and teeming with fish — around 10 species introduced by Sampaio, including fat tilapia and carp, peixe cascudo, peixe vidro, paulistinha, espadinha and tiny guaru (the latter excellent for eating mosquitoes and their larvae, and thus combating the spread of dengue fever, which is on the rise in the city as a result of millions of liters of hoarded water). The ponds attract all manner of birds, and they also attract people.
“People were a little wary of coming through the park before,” Sampaio says.
The park’s abundance of water comes as no surprise to its neighbors, many of whom have had springs in their back yards for generations. In a simple house whose back wall borders the park, meters from the fishponds, Eli Maria Jose Salis and her family have enjoyed a steady supply of spring water, run in from the park in a pipe that leads to a second water tank, for more than 30 years.
Do they need it to top up the water supply they get from SABESP (the city’s privatized water board)?
“No, we get plenty of water,” Salis says. “It’s not that. It’s just that we have all this water, and it wouldn’t be right to waste it.” SABESP, meanwhile, loses more than 30 percent of the treated drinking water in its distribution network as a result of massive leakage from badly deteriorated pipes, as well as theft and clandestine connections.
SABESP, like Existe Aqua em SP and Rios e Ruas, is also on the hunt for rivers. In a series of urgent “mega-projects” aimed at making up the shortfall in Sao Paulo’s water supply, it is working on a project to reverse the course of the River Sao Lourenco, and to siphon millions of gallons of water from the rivers Paraiba do Sul, Guaio, Juquia and Itatinga, piping the water to the city of Sao Paulo’s Alto Tiete and Cantareira reservoir systems. State governor Geraldo Alckmin is hoping the measures will banish the specter of a draconian two-day-on/five-day-off water rationing regime that is still on the cards, if reservoirs have not recovered sufficiently by the start of the dry season in April.
“The authorities only seem able to conceive of massive construction works, costing billions,” Sampaio says. “But they’re not even guaranteed to work — many of those rivers are extremely low on water too.”
Sampaio gave up his job as an insurance salesman last year, after 20 years, to devote himself to environmental activism full-time. As we stand on a piece of wasteland above the park, taking in the view across Pompeia, he expounds on the urgent need for reforestation, and on the subject of “linear parks” alongside rivers and streams, which create lakes, ponds and bodies of water capable of retaining stormwater and rainwater, as well as places for people to sit, walk and cycle in peace.
“I want to help remind people what rivers and streams are — what springs are,” he says.
“We seem to have forgotten that we’re part of nature,” he says, “but the fact is that we’re surrounded by it, even when we can’t see it.”
Sampaio spots a couple of guavas on a spindly tree and picks them, and we bite into their tight green skin, crunching through to the pink flesh and seeds inside. It makes no sense to allow useful water to simply drain away, he says. It should not be a difficult matter, he says, for the city to begin to classify, store and use some of its underground water, even if not for drinking, then for hundreds of other uses.
For now, many people are taking the matter into their own hands, and making use of what water they can.
The brimming water table on which Sao Paulo sits makes its existence plain in the gutters of countless city streets, gushing down channels so well traversed that some of the curbstones are bright green with moss. At a rate of as much as 5,000 liters an hour, the clear water, mostly of reasonable quality, is ceaselessly pumped from the bowels of buildings whose foundations have perforated the water table, often as a result of subterranean car parks.
With the shortage now in full effect, some of that water is now being captured by private citizens and residents for use in sluicing floors, watering plants and washing cars. Most, however, is channeled straight into the wastewater system, where it mixes with sewage before finding its way into the Pinheiros and the Tiete — two interconnected, heavily polluted rivers that slink sadly through the city, trapped between 12 lanes of traffic on the the Marginal ring road.
The Pinheiros, once an exuberantly curved, classically serpentine plains river, has been channeled into long straight stretches since the 1940s, and to this day, receives discharges of raw sewage at various points along its sluggish, fetid trajectory — including, according to De Campos, from the chic Cidade Jardim shopping center. There is no provision, he says, for wastewater treatment along that entire stretch of the river’s left bank.
“People like to lament that the rivers are polluted as if it were a fait accompli,” he says. “But it’s not the way it works. The problem is that we’re polluting them now.”
According to De Campos, cleaning up the waterways, including the moribund Pinheiros and the Tiete is far simpler than it might seem: Stop polluting them, starting with the streams.
“Rivers are more than capable of cleaning themselves,” he says, “if we just give them the chance.”
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