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 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 .
The official explanation is that has depleted the . July was the in more than 120 years. The Superaqueduct, a large, that carries water to the metro area, also , severely reducing water supplies.
“,” Gov. Jenniffer González said in early August as water rationing began.
But as a 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.
People were already living without water
Puerto Ricans have dealt with that left 400,000 customers receiving water service every third day, and again . 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 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 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 , 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 .
Losing half its water to leaks
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 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 agencies for its water system repair work. To secure those funds, it – treatment plants, meters and hurricane reconstruction – rather than the thousands of miles of small pipes where most of the water is lost.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has put Puerto Rico’s need for distribution and transmission pipe work at , far more than the for water systems or the amount it gets from customers.
Mistrust of the system
In addition to the outages, water quality problems over the years have created widespread mistrust of Puerto Rico’s water system.
An found that in 2015, water systems serving the island had more health and other violations than in any other U.S. state or territory.
In 2021, researchers analyzing EPA compliance data found that had systems the agency classifies as serious violators. However, that label does not tell a household whether the problem is contamination or paperwork, which is part of why people stop trusting what comes out of the tap.
I worked on a research team led by engineers at Iowa State University that studied how Puerto Rican households get their drinking water. In 2022, we in the Loíza, Comerío and Aguas Buenas regions.
Sixty-four percent said they mistrusted their tap water. They talked about taste, color and smell, and their own history with the utility. One said the water tasted like the ocean. Another said that, after Hurricane Maria, the pipes smelled of dead animals. A third boiled the water as recommended, got sick anyway, and didn’t go back to using tap water.
Some residents said they rely on bottled water when they can, even when the taps are running. One told us she uses municipal water when her bottled water runs out because she has no car and will not keep asking her children to bring more. A few said relatives shamed them if they used water from the faucet.
These households are paying for water whether it arrives or not. The published residential rate starts near $30 a month on top of the cost of the water actually used. But buying bottled water is more expensive than tap water, and the , compared to roughly $82,000 nationally. The poverty rate is 37.3%.
A in Loíza found 86% using bottled water and 71% also drinking tap water.
Paying for repairs
A utility that cannot hold its customers will have an even harder time financing its repairs.
The system’s $1.1 billion in annual revenue can’t cover the roughly $1.3 billion in operating costs and $240 to $270 million a year in debt service on about $3.8 billion in long-term debt. That is why the capital program is mostly federally funded.
But that federal funding is paid as reimbursements, and the . Puerto Rico’s found it slowed even more after FEMA added new procedural requirements in 2025.
In Puerto Rico, the money for repairs mostly exists on paper. Some is obligated but not disbursed, some is committed to court-ordered wastewater work instead, and almost none of it is aimed at the small pipes losing the water. A utility that has spent two decades for breaking Clean Water Act rules and releasing raw sewage into waterways still cannot cover the island’s water system’s actual needs.
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