MEXICO CITY — The three reservoirs that supply roughly a quarter of Mexico City’s water stood at 92 percent of capacity on Saturday, the national water commission reported, the highest level in nine years and a dramatic turnaround from the spring of 2024, when the system fell below 30 percent and officials openly discussed a “day zero” on which taps across the capital would run dry.
The recovery follows the wettest rainy season in the central highlands since 2010, with the Valle de Bravo reservoir alone receiving 1,340 millimeters of rain between May and September, about 40 percent above the long-term average. Water managers have begun releasing supplies to the city at the full design rate of 15 cubic meters per second for the first time since 2022.
“The system is in the best condition it has been in a decade,” said Ernesto Villalobos Garza, the commission’s regional director. “But I want to be clear: a wet year is weather. The problem was never only weather.”
Mexico City, a metropolis of 22 million built on a drained lakebed, loses an estimated 40 percent of its water to leaks in a 13,000-kilometer pipe network, much of it more than 50 years old and fractured by the city’s steady subsidence, which exceeds 30 centimeters a year in some eastern boroughs. The city’s own aquifer, which supplies most of the rest of its water, is being pumped at roughly twice the rate at which it recharges.
In Iztapalapa, the city’s most populous borough and the one hardest hit during the 2024 crisis, the full reservoirs have made little difference. Water still arrives by truck in several colonias, where residents pay private vendors 150 to 300 pesos, about $8 to $16, for a 1,000-liter tank. “They tell us on television the dams are full,” said Rosa María Hernández, 52, who runs a small grocery and stores water in six blue barrels on her roof. “The dams are not on my street. On my street the pipe has been broken since February.”
The city government says it has repaired 9,400 leaks this year and is spending 11 billion pesos, about $600 million, on a program to replace pipes and build rainwater capture systems at 100,000 homes. Critics say the pace is far too slow. “At the current rate, we will have replaced the network in roughly 90 years,” said Dr. Laura Cisneros, a hydrologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “The reservoirs gave us a reprieve, not a solution. We should treat this year as the time we were given to fix the pipes, and we are not using it.”
Forecasters at the national meteorological service warned that a developing La Niña pattern could bring a drier-than-normal 2027. Mr. Villalobos said the commission would keep the reservoirs above 80 percent through the dry season “if the city lets us,” a reference to the political pressure to release more water when levels are high.
“Everyone wants to open the tap when the dam is full,” he said. “That is how we got to 30 percent.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 13 of the European edition with the headline: After Years of Drought, Mexico City’s Reservoirs Are Nearly Full. Few Believe It Will Last..
