Tulum anyone?

[rddvet]

Worse for the area will be the new airport MX wants in Tulum, and the new train. More people, more crime, more sewage. Even without increased crime, that area will become one big septic tank if it keeps growing.

I agree. There are already big issues with all of the all-inclusive resorts going in. My wife works in karst biology/hydrogeology. Her assessments of what to expect to happen with a large portion of the caves in the next 25 years is scary.

 

[rddvet]

Prioritizing an airport and a train in a region with almost no effective waterwater treatment, where you can't flush TP in a toilet, where there is no clean drinking water, and where garbage is just dumped in the jungle (upstream) without any lining to isolate it from the groundwater...

In a swift decade or so (a few are already) the reefs will be dead with nutrients and the caves will be like swimming in septic systems - and we'll all complain how it went to hell. Gun violence and cartels are just one more insult.

When politicians get involved, stupid decsions are made regardless of country. Here in Florida many cities have been injecting "grey" water (aka contaminated runoff) into the deep aquifer as a means of getting rid of it rather than paying for processing plants or shipping the water elsewhere for processing. Even crazier is one major metropolitan city here hired a consulting firm to study the effects. The consulting firm worked in conjunction with a renowned florida research university. When the city read the study and realized it was stating that deep aquifer injection is damaging to the aquifer and our water supply, they threatened to sue the university if the study (a student's thesis mind you) was published.

 

[boulderjohn]

Prioritizing an airport and a train in a region with almost no effective waterwater treatment, where you can't flush TP in a toilet, where there is no clean drinking water, and where garbage is just dumped in the jungle (upstream) without any lining to isolate it from the groundwater...

In a swift decade or so (a few are already) the reefs will be dead with nutrients and the caves will be like swimming in septic systems - and we'll all complain how it went to hell. Gun violence and cartels are just one more insult.

About 15 years ago one of my scuba students said he was getting certified to assist in his work consulting with Mexico as they were trying to deal with this very problem--resorts dumping their waste into the cave system a few miles inland in the Mayan Riviera. He explained how all of it entering the ground water and then seeping into the ocean was destroying the reefs.

I just want to emphasize that it was 15 years ago that they understood the problem and were supposedly working to solve it. I have no idea what happened, but it looks as if my student's work had no palpable effect whatsoever.

 

[BRT]

Streets are drained by drilling wells into the karst and putting in a grate.

 

[kensuf]

I grew up in Miami during a period of time where tourists getting carjacked and killed as well as bodies being found chopped up in the everglades made international news. Meh.

Has anyone seen the crowds at some of the North Florida springs over Memorial day weekend? Why was Telford closed?

 

[jadairiii]

I grew up in Miami during a period of time where tourists getting carjacked and killed as well as bodies being found chopped up in the everglades made international news. Meh.

That period has not ended.......but in Miami you can drink the water and Florida has liberal reciprocity with other states for concealed carry licenses.

 

[sea_ledford]

About 15 years ago one of my scuba students said he was getting certified to assist in his work consulting with Mexico as they were trying to deal with this very problem--resorts dumping their waste into the cave system a few miles inland in the Mayan Riviera. He explained how all of it entering the ground water and then seeping into the ocean was destroying the reefs.

I just want to emphasize that it was 15 years ago that they understood the problem and were supposedly working to solve it. I have no idea what happened, but it looks as if my student's work had no palpable effect whatsoever.

They don't even have to dump it in the cenotes. Just having a septic field does the same thing. I did my Masters thesis on the reefs off of Sian Ka'an, comparing them the similar reefs off of Playa del Carmen. The SK reefs were in pretty good shape at that point, the PDC reefs were completely overgrown with algae due to the increased nutrients in the water from the sewage. That was in 2001. Tulum was about 6 square blocks of dirt roads.

I last was down there in about 2017, and Tulum was the size of PDC in 2001. I imagine the reefs were in about the same relative shape.

With all the karst ground, I don't know of a way to prevent it from happening outside of a completely closed system of wastewater treatment. The ecosystem just can't handle as many people that are going down there.

 

[newmanl]

I've been making cave diving trips to the Tulum area for the last 11 years, and as an aquatic biologist (specializing in freshwater tropical ecosystems and species) noticed immediately that some of the fishes displayed signs of a toxic environment - split fins, dissolved membranes between both spiny rays and soft rays in the fins, neuromast pit erosion and general scale row disfiguration. Those observations, my ears and the geology of the area told me everything I didn't want to know! We are cave diving in Tulum's sewer system.

Without much looking, I found this paper that confirms what we all know.

(PDF) Contaminants in the coastal karst aquifer system along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

PDF | Intensive land development as a result of the rapidly growing tourism industry in the "Riviera Maya" region of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico may... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

www.researchgate.net

 

[rjack321]

I've been making cave diving trips to the Tulum area for the last 11 years, and as an aquatic biologist (specializing in freshwater tropical ecosystems and species) noticed immediately that some of the fishes displayed signs of a toxic environment - split fins, dissolved membranes between both spiny rays and soft rays in the fins, neuromast pit erosion and general scale row disfiguration. Those observations, my ears and the geology of the area told me everything I didn't want to know! We are cave diving in Tulum's sewer system.

Without much looking, I found this paper that confirms what we all know.

(PDF) Contaminants in the coastal karst aquifer system along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

PDF | Intensive land development as a result of the rapidly growing tourism industry in the "Riviera Maya" region of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico may... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

www.researchgate.net

While passive samplers, particularly when paired with 2011 analytical technology, aren't the most accurate way of measuring concentrations... Many of these results are actually much lower than I would have expected. The pesticide results in Fig3 B are the (big) red flags to me. And now a decade later I can only imagine all other these locations are more and more like PA1.

 

[jadairiii]

This is never good for tourism.....

Drug violence sparks chaos at popular tourist resort in Mexico

A hotel in Mexico popular with American tourists was sent into chaos Thursday amid reports of gunfire. According to local authorities, a confrontation between drug dealers had exploded into lethal violence on a beach nearby.

www.cnn.com