Piles of the Mayan Train in Section 5 South, between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, disintegrate and contaminate the underground rivers of the Mayan aquifer. Environmentalists document crumbling columns and spills of cement.
PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Q. Roo (Proceso).- The piles that support the track of the Mayan Train from Playa del Carmen to Tulum have begun to disintegrate inside the underground rivers, where they no longer only represent a source of contamination in the water of the Mayan aquifer, but also a risk of collapse of the structures of the federal work.
Environmentalists from Sélvame MX, in a dive carried out earlier this year, discovered these faults with huge spills of cement and rust that lie at the bottom of the caves, which are flooded with fresh water.
This has been detected near the tourist towns of Akumal, Chemuyil, and Xpu-ha, in the heart of the Riviera Maya, where the Portuguese company Mota-Engil and the Mexican Grupo Indi carried out the work.
It is section 5 South of the Mayan Train, with a length of about 60 kilometers, which runs just above the Ox Bel Ha underground river system, one of the longest in the world.
It was precisely in that stretch where the environmentalists of Sélvame del Tren, today Sélvame MX, rejected the project due to damage to the Mayan aquifer that they already warned, which earned them reviling from former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from his morning conference at the National Palace.
It was precisely the former president who suggested, with the argument that it would avoid damaging the underground river system, to raise the Maya Train track in that section, since in most of the peninsular ring the rails pass at ground level or in some cases on an embankment.
José Urbina Bravo, a member of Sélvame MX, who made the recent dive in which video recordings were taken, said that the structures that support the road fall apart just by touching them.
“We could also find columns that have small cuts. We can see how, with the finger, it is crumbling. It melts with touch. I would like someone to explain to me why this is happening. What does it mean? What measures are going to be taken? Clearly, these samples make us see large and very dangerous faults,” Urbina Bravo warned.
Alerts
The execution of the works of Section 5 South began in the summer of 2022 after the contempt of the federal authorities of the suspensions of the amparo granted by a judge in Yucatán.
Mota-Engil and Grupo Indi were given contracts for approximately two-thirds of the railway track in that section, contractual documents that, according to a search carried out by Proceso, do not appear with the different government agencies obliged to make them public through the National Transparency Platform.
This is how the road, which was initially going to pass at ground level, was raised with bridges supported by piles that immediately caused controversy among environmentalists because the piling method lacerated the karst soil, rich in freshwater reserves in this part of the country.
Since 2023, the contamination of the Mayan aquifer has been denounced, where the water went from being crystal clear to completely turbid.
“In 2024, Urbina Bravo explains, doing some tours of the jungle, we were seeing how they were doing the drilling, and every time we had the opportunity we started to see what they were doing. There we detected that there was a large cement spill, just as we detected it in Garra de Jaguar, as we detected IT in Ocho Balas, as it was detected in several places, but here we detected it underwater.”
In videos provided to this media, the result of the last dive by the environmentalists, it is possible to appreciate the route of the leak of the cement already solidified.
“When I managed to get to where the columns (piles) were, I realized that one of these columns had burst completely, spilling tons of cement into the system. We take the record, make the complaint, and they promise to clean up and repair this. So recently we did the control diving, to see what they had done (…) that column is garbage and it was not repaired. That and another one behind it that is also bursting.”
Proceso sought the version of the company responsible for the Mayan Train through its different official channels, but there was no response.
Uncertainty about the freighter
The federal government is currently promoting the Mayan Train in its cargo mode, which will use these same tracks. To this end, it is building the multimodal terminal in Cancun, with an investment of 7.7 billion pesos in a context where the low attendance of passengers in the various stations has been evidenced, some of them located in the main tourist towns of Cancun and the Riviera Maya, as Proceso has published since the train started operations.
“A collapse with passengers would be a tragedy, especially because of all the warnings that were made, but the ecological impact would be great. The worrying thing is that they insist on putting a freight train… If a collapse occurs and we are left without an aquifer, it would be a tragedy that would truly end the aquifer in this area. We would have serious problems because it is impossible to clean up.”
In addition to the dives, the environmentalists of Sélvame MX will carry out water quality studies at more points where they suspect these fractures occur; The activists are taking legal action, such as a complaint for probable environmental crimes.
However, they recognize that there are around 15 thousand piles that were embedded in the ground, and most of them do not have access.
Source: Proceso
The Mexico Daily Post
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