Puerto Ricans stopped trusting tap water long before mandatory rationing began
Imagine turning on your kitchen faucet and nothing comes out. Not for an hour, but for two full days. Then the water returns, only to stop again two days later.
That is what more than 180,000 customers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and six nearby municipalities have been dealing with since Aug. 7, 2026, and officials expect 48-hour rotating outages to continue at least through August.
The official explanation is drought that has depleted the island’s reservoirs. July was the driest month San Juan has recorded in more than 120 years. The Superaqueduct, a large, aging pipe system that carries water to the metro area, also ruptured in June, severely reducing water supplies.
“This situation is out of our hands,” Gov. Jenniffer González said in early August as water rationing began.
But as a professor of urban planning who has spent years studying water in Puerto Rico, I know that a great deal of the problem Puerto Rico is facing has been in someone’s hands. And for many households I’ve spoken with, the announcement changed less for their daily lives than you might expect.
Puerto Ricans have dealt with water-rationing before, including during a drought in 2015 that left 400,000 customers receiving water service every third day, and again in 2020. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, parts of the island went nearly five months without dependable service. The water interruptions never really stopped for many Puerto Ricans after that.
Residents of one San Juan neighborhood counted 123 days of water outages over the 13 months before the latest rolling outages began. Some brought their unwashed laundry to a protest in the capital in August 2026. A community leader in another town told The Associated Press the rolling outages schedule did not mean much, because her neighborhood had been experiencing water outages for several months.
Filling buckets, keeping jugs by the door, checking the faucet each morning – for many Puerto Ricans, that routine was in place long before now.
The government-owned water company, Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, or PRASA, is responsible for the water system. But no agency publishes how often households lose service, and Puerto Rico has no independent water regulator. Past engineers’ reports for PRASA have counted reported leaks and overflows, but not how many homes were affected. Much of the information about the latest outages has come instead from residents and investigations by the Puerto Rico House and Senate into repeated water interruptions.
Part of Puerto Rico’s water problem is the large amount of water lost between water treatment facilities and customers.
Two aging systems are failing at once: large transmission mains like the Superaqueduct, where a break can cut off an entire city, and roughly 15,000 miles of distribution lines that leak continuously.
This is not a new problem. PRASA lost 267 million of the 513 million gallons it produced each day, close to half, to leaks from pipes before it reached anyone in fiscal year 2024, according to Puerto Rico’s federally appointed Financial Oversight and Management Board, which certifies the utility’s budget. The utility’s fiscal plan includes investing in leak detection, but shows only a 6% reduction in water losses since 2019.
Overall, the costs have been estimated at nearly US$100 million annually in wasted water production and over $200 million in lost revenue.
The island, which has been battered by severe storms and earthquakes in recent years, relies heavily on disaster recovery funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and funding from other federal and state agencies for its water system repair work. To secure those funds, it prioritizes projects that FEMA will reimburse – treatment plants, meters and hurricane reconstruction – rather than the thousands of miles of small pipes where most of the water is lost.
