Empty jugs and dry reservoirs: Inside Puerto Rico’s worsening water emergency

By Ray Sanchez, Isabel Rosales, CNN

(CNN) — Milagros Pica Quiñones’ small concrete home is an untamed menagerie of bottles, paint buckets, bleach and laundry detergent jugs.

The 96-year-old grandmother in the impoverished oceanfront town of Loiza, in Puerto Rico’s northeast, sees “the thinnest thread of water” trickling from her faucet most days before service is shut off from 10 p.m. until dawn.

“I drag the buckets away with whatever strength I have and I cover them,” Pica Quiñones said. “Three buckets in the bathroom. One in my kitchen. Outside, I have three, two-gallon buckets. In front of the house: 15 smaller, gallon-sized containers. Next to a wall – 10 large bottles.”

The scramble to find water – collecting it in small vessels and cisterns – is a daily survival routine for hundreds of thousands of other US citizens on the island due to widespread service interruptions. The most vulnerable – the elderly, the sick, low-income people – are forced to bear the heaviest burden.

Billed as a beautiful and vibrant tourist destination, Puerto Rico is home to 3.2 million Americans who face an exhausting daily struggle for necessities like clean, running water. Pica Quiñones, whose showers consist of dipping a red Solo cup into a bucket, thinks about water all the time.

The US territory’s fragile water situation reached a new critical point over the summer – exacerbated by drought and what experts say is mismanagement and aging infrastructure, including a lack of investment and maintenance. On Friday, people living in the capital of San Juan and nearby communities completed their third full week on mandatory water rationing schedules.

Forced to endure up to two days without running water, residents must rely on bucket baths and dry shampoo, use bottled water for cooking and making coffee, paper plates and plastic utensils to eat, and occasionally forgo laundry, housecleaning and toilet flushing. All while their water bills keep coming.

“When you have a drought colliding with an aging infrastructure, that’s more than a drought. That’s a humanitarian crisis, and it’s a crisis which is deep,” said Northeastern University chemistry professor Eugene Smotkin, who lives in Old San Juan with his wife. “It’s not a drought story.”

Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón declared a state of emergency July 31 due to the drought. It’s unknown how long the rationing measures will remain in place, she said.

“This is a situation that we never expected to happen,” the Republican governor told CNN earlier this month, referring to the drought.

The US Department of Agriculture approved a drought disaster declaration on the island, allowing farmers and agricultural producers in 26 municipalities to access emergency loans, the governor’s office announced Wednesday.

The governor told MS NOW this week she was “not ruling out” asking Washington for a national emergency declaration, which would unleash massive federal funding for Puerto Rico. Her government, González-Colón said, need to “exhaust all the local assets, all the resources before asking for a national declaration of emergency.”

“I totally understand the frustration,” she said of island residents who blame the government for the longtime water woes, acknowledging a lack of maintenance to the island’s infrastructure.

Below-normal rainfall could continue until next year

The capital of San Juan recorded its driest month on record in more than 120 years in July, said Emanuel Rodriguez, a hydrologist at National Weather Service in San Juan.

Most of the island archipelago is experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions, affecting more than 3 million people, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Lakes and streams – some at or near record lows – are losing water amid a rainfall deficit that could last months, Rodriguez said.

“We could stay below normal (rainfall levels) at least until January,” he added.

The water emergency is also a consequence of the deteriorating infrastructure, particularly a series of recent ruptures in the so-called Superaqueduct, a crucial 72-inch pipeline that carries potable water 50 miles along the northern coast to the densely populated San Juan metro area.

Since the pipeline’s rupture in June, the Puerto Rico National Guard and government agencies from throughout the island have been distributing potable water from cistern trucks, according to the governor’s office.

The governor’s office and the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Carlos Pesquera, a civil engineer and former secretary of transportation and head of public works who was appointed by the governor as an advisor on the water crisis, said the drought “is the immediate trigger” of the current emergency, “but it does not fully explain the vulnerability” of the water system.

“Puerto Rico has aging infrastructure, significant water losses and areas where greater redundancy and resilience are needed,” Pesquera, a member of the pro-statehood governing party, told CNN via email.

Before the recent ruptures, nearly 60% of water treated by the aqueduct and sewer authority was lost mostly due to “inaccurate meters, unauthorized water consumption, or water main leaks,” according to a 2019 report on the island’s infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Stints of waterless days for years

Hilda Rodríguez, the 58-year-old executive director of a San Juan nonprofit, has been keeping a log of waterless days at her home in the Monteflores neighborhood in the Santurce section of the capital. She started it five years ago, using a water droplet emoji 💧 to track on her cell phone the days without water.

This year, the log shows more than 200 days without water.

In 2025, there were 175 days. The previous year: 142 days. In 2023, 100 days. And 136 days in 2022. A year earlier, 22 days.

“I needed to write all this down because no one would believe me,” she said with a laugh. “In Puerto Rico, we make a joke of everything. It’s the best way to survive all the things that happen to us – one way to escape as we keep going.”

This crisis is no joke.

“It’s one stumble after another,” said Rodríguez, who has also been tracking every phone complaint she’s made to the water utility over the years. “Just when you think you’re finally getting back up, something else happens.”

In another Santurce neighborhood, a group known as “Exigimos Agua” (We Demand Water) has also kept an online log of days without water or electrical power since 2024, when 57 waterless days and 58 days without power were tracked by the Machuchal residents. So far this year, the group says there have been more than 140 days with no water and at least 24 days without electricity.

Puerto Ricans, including the more than 2 million living in the San Juan metro area, have long endured major droughts made worse by the aging water system.

Severe droughts caused water restrictions, affecting more than a million people, from 2014-2016, and more recently in 2020.

“The water problem in the San Juan area has been with us for years,” Rodriguez said. “Every year it gets worse. It’s draining, a constant state of worry. It is no way to live.”

During a 1994 drought, rationing left the San Juan metro area with water available only every second or third day, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the American Society of Civil Engineers. On days when water was available, the pressure in some communities would arrive after midnight and fade by dawn, the report said.

In 1995, with water service only two or three days a week, Rodriguez purchased and paid to install a 600-gallon cistern for about $1,000. If she were to do it now, she said it would cost her more than twice as much.

At the time, the island’s water utility responded to the 1994 drought by vowing to end shortages with the $1 billion construction of the Superaqueduct and its interconnections, as well as dredging the main source of water for the San Juan area, the Carraízo reservoir.

With a capacity of 75 million gallons of water per day, the Superaqueduct went into service in 2000.

After more than a quarter century of service, the Superaqueduct’s recent breaks exposed a key weakness in Puerto Rico’s water system: The heavy reliance on a single, long-distance transmission line without an equivalent backup during a major interruption requires sustained attention and investment, according to Pesquera.

He was appointed as a special advisor for water infrastructure after last year’s rupture and prepared a report for the government on improvements to alleviate the island’s water problems.

“The Superaqueduct was originally designed as a complimentary water source. Its purpose was to reinforce existing systems and make the metropolitan (San Juan) network stronger, not to replace traditional water sources,” he wrote in his report.

González-Colón has said at least $7 billion in federal funds had been committed to water infrastructure improvement projects. The lack of maintenance and investment in the water system dates back decades, she said earlier this week, and the destruction of hurricanes Irma and Maria made matters worse.

For Smotkin, the water crisis reflects the island’s history of structural neglect and systemic abandonment by both local and federal authorities. The water woes must be seen in the context of Puerto Rico’s dependency on the United States.

“The enduring image is of people standing with bottles and jugs, spending their lives trying to obtain something as elementary as water because the infrastructure that should have delivered it had failed them,” said Smotkin, who has lived on the island nearly 25 years and works to bring renewable energy sources to Puerto Rico.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Lourdes Tañon, a resident of Trujillo Alto, a municipality southeast of San Juan, was on her way to check the cistern at the home of her mother. Suddenly, it started to rain.

The driver of another car stopped, putting his hands out the window as if to capture the falling droplets, she recalled.

“Getting wet under the first rain of May is a custom here because it supposedly brings good luck,” she said. “People go outside and get wet. That’s what it feels like now when it rains. We’re all praying for more rain.”

‘This is now our daily life’

In 2017, Hurricane Maria struck nine days before the grand opening of Hector Rosa’s restaurant, Rosa Cocina Libre, in San Juan’s Cupey district. The opening was delayed for five months.

Now he finds himself confronting another crisis, one he believes could have been prevented. His mornings begin by turning on the faucets to see if water is running.

If there is no water, Rosa scrambles to figure out where to get it and how quickly. The restaurant has a cistern and two additional mobile tanks, with a combined capacity of about 2,000 gallons. He must fill up the three tanks at least once a day to keep the restaurant running. He often questions how much longer he can keep operating in Puerto Rico, Rosa said.

“I love my island and I love to be here in Puerto Rico,” he said. “I want to be part of the island but it’s like having your hands tied every single year — every single month it’s something.”

The water crisis has become impossible to ignore anywhere Eduardo Caldazo goes.

At his apartment in Isla Verde, one of the island’s busiest tourist areas, and at his restaurant-bar, Calle Sin Salida in San Juan, there is no warning about when the water will vanish or return.

He relies on a 400-gallon water tank to keep his restaurant operating four days a week but keeping it filled is a full-time job.

“This is now our daily life,” he said. “I know it won’t be fixed.”

Rafael Cabrera, a 64-year-old university professor, lives in a 30-apartment condominium complex in Monteflores, just south of Machuchal. In 2022, residents raised nearly $100,000 to purchase a pump and cistern to remedy intermittent water service problems. The cistern, which holds nearly 4,000 gallons, went unused until last year, when residents were issued the required water utility permits to activate it, Cabrera said.

“The hardest part is lacking hope about a problem that seems to have no solution,” he said.

Some residents said hope is elusive given the island’s litany of miseries – from natural disasters to a bankrupt government to a financial control board that manages funding for infrastructure.

“The frustration is understandable, but it is also important to recognize how complex it is to restore a water distribution system after an extended interruption,” Pesquera told CNN when asked about residents’ criticism. “Residents and businesses need the most realistic information possible about when service will actually reach their area.”

In Loiza, Pica Quiñones’ great-granddaughter, Modesta Irizarry, drives around helping elderly neighbors. She collects water from cistern trucks, distributes donated packs of bottled water and food, and leads water truck drivers to the homes of the bedridden. Almost every day, she makes time to check on her great-grandmother.

“I find many older adults alone in subhuman conditions with no one to care for them,” she lamented, her voice fading.

Irizarry has helped her community in the aftermath of hurricanes, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and other emergencies. The despair over the water crisis, she said, is similar to life after Hurricane Maria.

“I wish I had more hands. There are people who, no matter how much they need it, won’t ask for help. They won’t let you in because of shame. The suffering is so great.”

Her great-grandmother, meanwhile, spends part of her days filling up her menagerie of bottles and containers.

“Whenever we have water, I fill every bottle and bucket I can find. I’ve never had to live like this – not even after the worst storms,” Pica Quiñones said.

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