San Juan, PR – Once stricken with daily disruptions of constant power outages, over 120,000 Puerto Ricans in the San Juan metropolitan area and surrounding municipalities are currently facing a severe running water crisis. Triggered by massive ruptures in the 72-inch “Superacueducto” pipeline in Bayamon – with breaks at three separate points – that has broken distribution lines and wrecked running water service down to an intermittent flow output or total and complete service outages, at times lasting for weeks and even months, daily life in some parts of Puerto Rico has been reduced to residents praying for the water delivery truck to stop in their neighborhood.
In response to the crisis that has hit hard in the areas of San Juan, Bayamon, Guaynabo, Caguas, Juncos, and Loiza, Governor Jennifer Gonzalez has activated the Puerto Rico National Guard to alleviate the situation and help distribute potable water.
Emergency responders and local municipalities are using modified dairy tankers and water trucks to supply designated distribution points “oases” across affected neighborhoods. With no running water, locals are forced to haul heavy buckets up multiple flights of stairs just to wash dishes, flush toilets, and bathe. The physically demanding daily nature of the routine is leading to hospitalizations, particularly among the elderly and disabled.
The problem has been building for months, caused by ruptures and leaks in Puerto Rico’s aging aqueduct system. Ironically, the underlying cause is not a lack of water supply, but rather decades of neglect, deferred maintenance, and infrastructure failure within the island’s aqueduct system. Decades of underinvestment and bureaucratic ignorance have created an incredibly fragile aqueduct and pipeline network.
The island’s utilities company extracts water from rivers, reservoirs, and underground aquifers that have in the past provided sufficient supply for the U.S. Territory’s 3.2 million people.
This week, workers have been scrambling to repair a massive crack in one major pipe that has left tens of thousands of people in and around the nation’s capital of San Juan with no water at all. Utility workers are struggling to patch leaks; fixing one massive break often requires diverting resources away from other damaged pipes, leading to a frustrating cycle of ongoing, rolling outages. Extreme heat and localized drought conditions are exacerbating the strain on the system that feeds the island’s water supply and thereby accelerates the degradation of exposed portions of the infrastructure.
“This is really exhausting, it’s maddening,” said one aging woman. “We can’t take it sometimes. There are older people here, bedridden people.”
Despite efforts to put stop-gap measures in place to quell the situation, the years of neglect by the government have led to a problem that is not easily solved.
“This has been a disaster,” said Luz Laborde, President of a neighborhood association in a working-class community in San Juan. “This is inhuman…it’s destroying the emotional state of a people.”
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