MSc Thesis - Reliability Analysis of the Nezahualcoyotl Dike in the Aztec City of

Tenochtitlan

Abstract
Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, around the year 1519, the Valley of Mexico was a closed basin.
As a result, at the bottom of the valley, an extensive system of shallow lakes, lagoons, and swamps was
formed due to precipitation and permanent river’s discharge from the Sierra Nevada mountains. This
lacustrine system occupied around 1.000km2 of the total surface of the valley. Lakes Zumpango, Xaltocan,
Chalco, Xochimilco, Texcoco, and Mexico were distinguished. The capital of the Aztec empire,
Tenochtitlan, was founded and built on an island in the middle of Lake Mexico.

The Aztecs were known for their impressive constructions and hydraulic structures. At the time of the
Spanish conquest, they had a complex system of approximately 95 hydraulic structures (Palerm, 1973),
of which the most impressive one was the Nezahualcoyotl dike. This structure was roughly sixteen
kilometers long, eight meters’ height and three and a half meters’ width. Its principal function was to
protect the city of Tenochtitlan from high water levels in Lake Texcoco.

Nowadays, there are no remains of the dike and most of the lakes were drained. The purpose of this thesis
is to characterize the lacustrine system and the Nezahualcoyotl at the time of the Spanish conquest of
Mexico City dike by using historical documentation and present-day climate and terrain data. This in order
to assess the reliability of the dike as a flood defense mechanism and to compare it to modern safety levels.
The dike was tested for one failure mechanism: Overflow. A Markov chain and Copula models are
proposed in order to create a synthetic time series of precipitation and evaporation. Through a hydrological
balance, the water elevation at Lake Texcoco was obtained. In this way, it was possible to provide an
estimation of the water level fluctuation in the lake each year during the wet season. In total, a thousand
years of synthetic data were generated.

The results of this work show that the water levels in the lake system presented by Palerm (1973) and
Bradbury (1971) match the water levels obtained from a spatial analysis applied to the region. The model
was able to reproduce to a good extent the hydrology of the system resulting in a 0.003 probability of
failure (PF) for the dike. In other words, a 0.3% chance of being overflown in any one year. Additionally,
the model used to assess the reliability of the dike showed to be very sensitive to the tributary area of the
basin, and to the existing water level in Lake Texcoco at the beginning of the wet season. It is also
recommended to extend this research by taking into account the possibility that the dike could have had
gates that would have allowed to control water levels to a certain extent and also to take into account the
role of the water level fluctuations at the other five lakes. Ultimately a full analysis that characterized to
the best possible manner the complexity of the lake system and its highly intervened nature would be
desirable to understand the engineering capabilities of the Aztecs.

To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time that an attempt is made to compare the Aztec design
criteria with present time standards. This research illustrates, from an engineering point of view, the
possible design criteria of the Nezahualcoyotl dike and the uncertainties surrounding it. This work can be
used as a guideline to assess the reliability of other ancient structures or present-day constructions all over
the world whose design is largely based on informal criteria where information for the reliability
assessment is scarce.