Puerto Rico will begin alternating water rationing Friday morning, leaving more than 180,000 customer accounts without service for 48 hours at a time as drought conditions tighten their grip on San Juan and nearby communities.
The cuts will affect parts of San Juan and neighborhoods in Carolina, Juncos, Gurabo, Trujillo Alto, Canovanas and Loiza. Large trucks will distribute potable water, with priority given to hospitals and homes for older people, but officials have not said when the rationing will end and have warned it could stretch to 72 hours at a time.
The timing matters because the dry spell has already pushed San Juan into record territory. July was the driest month there in more than 120 years, with just 0.54 inches of rain, and the month also ranked as the second hottest on record. Across Puerto Rico, almost 25% of the island is under severe drought and another 36% is in moderate drought, while rainfall over the next two to three weeks is expected to run at least 50% below average and dry conditions are likely to last until at least September.
That backdrop explains why the rationing lands so hard now. Jenniffer González said late Tuesday that the situation was out of the government’s hands and could worsen, and on Wednesday Luis González Delgado said deliveries would go first to hospitals and older residents. Tania Conde Sterling said hospitals are prepared, adding that they do not improvise and rely on manuals and protocols for every scenario, a reassurance that sits uneasily beside neighborhoods in San Juan that have already documented 118 days this year with repeated water outages.
Marcia Soler París said her neighborhood has been living with severe shortages for months, long before the formal rationing begins. She said the situation is chaos and truly pitiful, especially for bedridden and older people who cannot carry heavy water buckets. The contrast is stark: hospitals are getting plans, trucks and priority deliveries, while many residents have already spent more than 100 days dealing with intermittent service, full-day shutoffs and very low pressure.
The water crisis also points to a larger failure that is not going away with Friday’s schedule. San Juan Mayor Miguel Romero sued the island’s Water and Sewer Authority in late May over shortages unrelated to the drought, and the governor has acknowledged that the system’s infrastructure has lacked investment and maintenance for decades. More than $7 billion in federal grants and low-interest loans have been awarded for water infrastructure, yet hundreds of projects remain in development, leaving the island to ration water now with no public timeline for when normal service will return.
