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.

People were already living without water

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........

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