Puerto Rico rations water as drought depletes key reservoir

The taps went silent in San Juan on Friday. Across Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of people woke to find their water shut off—not for an hour or two, but for forty-eight hours at a time. The island's government had begun rationing, dividing households into rotating groups, each losing running water for two full days before it returned, then losing it again. There is no announced end date.

The crisis stems from a collision of forces: a record-dry July that left the Carraízo reservoir, which supplies seven regions of the island, critically depleted, and infrastructure so compromised that the water authority loses roughly two-thirds of everything it produces. Leaks in aging pipes, unbilled water, the slow decay of systems built decades ago—these are not new problems. But the drought made them impossible to ignore. Governor Jenniffer González acknowledged the infrastructure failures but framed the rationing as a response to weather beyond the territory's control. "This situation is beyond our control," she said, noting that experts had warned of the conditions weeks earlier. The island is now experiencing moderate to severe drought across most of its land, with 68 percent facing drought conditions.

The rationing affects 180,000 properties, according to government figures. In the Morcelo area south of San Juan, residents were told water would flow on Friday and shut off on Sunday after the first two-day cycle. It didn't arrive. Community leader Rubén Torres told local media that twenty-four hours into the promised window, taps remained dry. "People are uncertain," he said, "because they know we're in the 48-hour window where we're supposed to have drinking water." The confusion extends across the territory. Some households and businesses do not know when their supply will be cut, or for how long.

As mains water disappeared, people lined up at tanker trucks dispatched to affected neighborhoods, filling bottles and containers. Gloriany Baba, a San Juan resident, described the conditions to reporters as "brutal" and "unbelievable to live through." The island has attempted water rationing before—in 2015 and 2020, when some 400,000 households received running water only every third day. This time, the measure is more frequent but affects fewer properties, a sign that conditions, while severe, have not yet reached those earlier extremes.

The drought is not Puerto Rico's only crisis. Governor González reported more than 1,000 wildfires burning across the island. She suggested that rain might return once a cloud of Saharan dust drifts away from the Caribbean, but offered no timeline. She also noted that the federal government was providing assistance, though she did not specify what form it would take. The island has endured extreme weather before. Hurricane Maria in 2017 devastated the electricity grid and killed thousands; scientists have said the storm's extreme rainfall was made more likely by human-induced climate change. Experts point to similar mechanisms at work now—sediment buildup in reservoirs, the absence of rain, and the degradation of infrastructure all converging to create a water emergency that officials say was foreseeable but not preventable.