Fog rolls across this Baja California fishing community like a coming tide. Early in the morning, it’s foggy. Sometimes at noon, it’s foggy. Late at night, it’s foggy. “When we go down in the mornings to get in the boat you can’t see anything,” says Juan Quintana, a 50-year-old diver who harvests sea urchin, lobster and other underwater delicacies. “It’s like this all the time.”

The fog banks that rise just offshore to envelop the coast are a nuisance to Quintana and the other divers and fishermen here. For their families back home, though, the biggest problem is the lack of drinking water.

Road builders destroyed pipes from a community water system nearly seven years ago. Since then, families have had to drive to the town of El Rosario on a rutted dirt road and fill their plastic water barrels there, a 20-mile round trip.

But Mexican researchers have a low-tech solution for Punta Baja’s water woes: turning the seasonal onset of fog into good-quality drinking water.

They are building a series of 36-foot-long fences to trap fog and provide about 10 gallons of water a day for each village resident.

Though small-scale, to be sure, the project comes amid a renaissance of fog catching in rural areas worldwide and ranks as one of the largest fog collection projects so far in North America.

“There is a need for water and there are the meteorological conditions,” says Martín Mundo Molina, a hydrologist from the Mexican Institute of Water Technology in Cuernavaca who has been studying several fog collecting sites in northern Baja California. “We are using technology appropriate for the people and the conditions.”

The technology to turn fog into drinking water is hardly new. Canary Islanders built wooden walls atop their houses to collect fog 2,000 years ago, and until the mid-1700s they carved stone basins to catch fog water dripping from trees.

Today, remote desert towns and islands in South America and Africa are setting up fog collectors using modern mesh.

The trick is finding the right conditions. Mundo discovered that the mountainous jungle regions of Chiapas, Mexico, have lots of fog, but not enough wind to push it through the mesh at the required speed. So a fog-to-water project there didn’t work. Instead, he turned the fog collectors into rain collectors for a community of 400 Tzotzil Indians.

In 1996, Mundo and collaborator Joel Hernández Blanket from Baja California Autonomous University (UABC) began studying the coastline of northern Baja for a foggy spot. They set out dozens of 3-foot-square mesh collectors that trap fog against nylon netting.

The researchers found that several villages around Ensenada—Salsipuedes, La Misión and La Bufadora—have lots of fog but no shortage of community drinking water.

However, Punta Baja, a six-hour drive from the U.S.-Mexican border, fit the bill. The tiny fishing community had plenty of fog—and an acute lack of water.

So last fall, Mundo, Hernández and engineering students from UABC went to work, aided by a $30,000 grant from the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation.

They began building a series of large mesh collectors—36 feet long and 12 feet high—supported by steel posts and cables.

Fog passing through the collectors condenses on the plastic mesh. The water drips into a series of tubes along the bottom and is stored in plastic tanks.

Mundo hopes eventually to erect 20 mesh panels on a bluff overlooking the village, where the fog is densest. He calculates 20 collectors would provide each of the village’s 50 residents nine to 11 gallons of water daily during the fog season, which runs from March to November, enough for cooking, cleaning and drinking.

Strong winds and rain have slowed the project, which is only half-finished.

While it appears to have support from the community, some villagers wonder when it’s going to get done.

“It’s a good project and there’s a lot of fog here, but they’ve been working on this for a while,” says Lázaro Sánchez, a local diver. “We’ll see what happens.”

Mundo says the project has two goals: to demonstrate the technology works and to transfer that technology to the people. Once the water system is running, the university plans to begin training residents to maintain and repair the collectors.

Despite the good intentions, obstacles remain. Like any community water system, Punta Baja’s will require someone to ration supplies. And a spigot left on by accident could drain the system within a few hours.

Such problems may prove more difficult than the engineering variety, Mundo says.

Punta Baja is just the latest fog catching site. Arid regions of Mexico and South America are good candidates for this emerging technology, according to Robert Schemenauer, a Canadian environmental scientist and fog expert.

Schemenauer helped set up the largest project to date, in a coastal village in the northern Atacama Desert of Chile. The 88-collector array has kept a community of 400 self-sufficient in water since 1992. Such have been the results that villagers have enough water left over to cultivate lemon trees.

The most important thing, Schemenauer says, is getting the town behind the project.

“You need to have the community involved from the beginning,” he says, “or the sustainability of the project is always in doubt.”