Puerto Rican Communities Bear the Brunt of the Water Crisis

The archipelago’s current water crisis, the product of a colonial system of debt, austerity, and extraction, cannot be solved by community organizing alone.

Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority station in Jayuya, Puerto Rico -- public domain image

By Mikael E. Rosa Rosa

As a child, visits to my grandmother’s home in the rural area between the municipalities of Humacao and Yabucoa, in eastern Puerto Rico, often began with the same question: “Is there running water?” Decades later, we have stopped asking—not because the problem has been solved, but because we already know the answer. She either has no running water at all or lives with such low water pressure that access remains uncertain. 

Community-based organizations across Puerto Rico, particularly in rural areas, have long organized to demand access to running water, but public officials often treat this struggle as a problem of the past. Yet the water-rationing program initiated by the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) on August 7 in response to an anticipated drought caused by the El Niño phenomenon reveals how persistent the problem remains. Although the program was recently suspended following temporary relief from cloud-seeding efforts, declining reservoir levels recorded on September 21—nearly a week after the intervention—underscore why Puerto Rico’s water crisis cannot be understood as a matter of climate alone.

The water crisis predates the current drought. PRASA has long struggled with deteriorating infrastructure, compounded by two unsuccessful privatization attempts between 1995 and 2004. Many communities have responded by developing their own aqueducts, but these initiatives cannot match the scale of the structural problem on their own.

Amid the drought, there are also growing concerns that El Súper Tubo, Puerto Rico’s main distribution pipeline, has reached the end of its useful life. In response, the government has called on residents and community organizations to prepare for drought conditions that could persist through the end of the year.

There is broad consensus in Puerto Rico on the importance of local communities in addressing the water crisis. Yet calls for communities to take the lead raise questions that demand a more nuanced approach. How is the burden of the water crisis distributed? What do calls for autonomous community action demand of local leaders and the everyday work of their organizations? How have the austerity measures imposed amid Puerto Rico’s debt crisis affected PRASA’s capacity to respond? 

Who Bears the Burden of Puerto Rico’s Water Crisis? 

The rationing affected an estimated 500,000 residents across San Juan, Trujillo Alto, Loíza, Canóvanas, Juncos, Gurabo, and Carolina, many of whom continue experiencing interruptions and low water pressure. The burden of Puerto Rico’s water crisis falls along lines of race, class, and gender. In Loíza—where 43 percent of the population lives in poverty and 32 percent identifies as Black or African American—residents have endured unreliable access to running water for nearly six months. Similarly, residents of Canóvanas—where 32 percent of the population lives in poverty and 15 percent identify as Black or African American—have faced this crisis for nearly six months. Among the seven municipalities affected by PRASA’s rationing program, Loíza and Canóvanas have both the highest poverty rates and the largest proportions of residents who identify as Black or African American. 

PRASA’s rationing program is not the only institutional response to the water crisis. Jennifer González Colón, Puerto Rico’s right-wing governor, declared a state of emergency through Executive Order 2026-035. The order attributes the crisis primarily to insufficient rainfall, prioritizes available water for potable use, and authorizes exemptions from standard procurement procedures. At the same time, communities and social movements have demanded more transparency from PRASA and González Colón over the management of the situation. In response, PRASA has threatened to fine residents for “misuse of water,” and Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources has deployed personnel in enforcement operations resembling police raids to identify residential and community wells it considers illegal.

The Double State of Exception

This move by González Colón’s administration recalls the politics of exception that have accompanied other emergencies in Puerto Rico, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As Sociologist José Atiles Osoria points out, the Puerto Rican government’s growing reliance on executive orders as a form of governance creates a double state of exception: one produced by U.S. colonial rule and the other by Puerto Rico’s executive branch’s routine use of executive orders. In a similar vein, sociologist Naomi Klein, in her work on The Shock Doctrine, reminds us how government institutions capitalize on emergencies to maximize fear and trauma, and expand their powers.

Puerto Ricans remember how these politics of exceptionality created opportunities for private firms to profit after the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane María in 2017. The current crisis has also revived more intimate memories of María. 

“This feels like going back to the times after Hurricane María. This activates my PTSD from [Hurricane] María,” one resident told me while collecting water from a tanker truck. We walked together briefly after filling our containers, and she ended our conversation with a clear statement: “This whole situation is not the result of insufficient rainfall. It is the result of the inefficiency of the people in charge.”

PRASA’s Unsustainability

Puerto Rico’s water crisis raises questions regarding PRASA’s situation under La Junta’s austerity measures. La Junta is the federally appointed fiscal control board created by Congress in 2016 to address the archipelago’s $70 billion in public debt and nearly $50 billion in pension liabilities. One of those drivers is PRASA. By 2017, the company had accumulated approximately $5 billion in debt, largely due to its reliance on borrowing to finance capital improvement projects. As part of its austerity agenda, referred to as government-rightsizing, La Junta initially pushed PRASA to reduce operating expenses, raise rates for its customers – 95 percent of whom are residential— and pursue private investment in infrastructure. 

As a result, PRASA cut $30 million from its 2026-27 budget for replacing and renovating equipment. At the same time, in its PRASA 2025 Fiscal Plan, La Junta reported that the capital improvement budget had grown, largely through federal post-disaster recovery funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Between 2019 and 2025, approximately $9 billion in federal funding was available for PRASA, of which $6.6 billion was obligated and $773 million disbursed, much of it in response to Hurricane María, Hurricane Fiona, and the earthquakes that struck Puerto Rico in 2020.

These numbers raise more questions than answers, especially given the repeated transparency and contracting scandals under González Colón’s administration. These controversies have ranged from fraud investigations involving procurement in the electric power sector to questionable contracting practices by Víctor Ramos, secretary of the Department of Health. Hence, the biggest scandal of González Colón’s administration was the concerns over conflicts of interest and the alleged influence of former secretary of government Francisco Domenech in benefiting his former lobbying firm, Politank. These and other corruption allegations provide grounds for questioning the management of the current water crisis and PRASA’s use of its resources, particularly given the recent influx of recovery funds.

Community Responses

The resurgence of post-María collective memories of solidarity, community organizing, and mutual aid requires a more nuanced analysis in the context of the current water crisis. After María, autonomous recovery efforts were widely celebrated across Puerto Rican civil society, either as empowering forms of self-reliance or—among more progressive groups—as emancipatory practices that challenged profit-driven approaches to disaster recovery. Now, the water crisis is reviving these memories and familiar calls for communities to care for one another. 

However, calls for communities to organize amid the water crisis and other emergencies can obscure the tensions that arise when residents are expected to fill gaps in governance themselves. In Puerto Rico, the burden of fulfilling the state’s role often falls on community leaders who devote hours of unpaid labor to helping neighbors who come to see them as substitutes for public officials. I witnessed these tensions while conducting research for my doctoral dissertation between 2022 and 2025, as community leaders and activists repeatedly expressed frustration with the growing expectation that they provide services and resources in the absence of public officials and state institutions. 

One neighborhood activist I spoke with, who is unnamed to avoid jeopardizing her organization’s funding, runs a community agroecological project. When I asked about her workload as a neighborhood activist, she immediately questioned the popular slogan that “only the people save the people.”That slogan sounds nice, and we use it during protests and mobilizations. But sometimes I feel like, all of a sudden, I have another responsibility. Now I have to ‘save the people,’ many of whom don’t even care about what is happening around them,” she said.

Another organizer working in an impoverished community in the San Juan metropolitan area expressed her concern with burnout among local leaders: “Our problem is that the urgent always comes before the important,” they said.

Recognizing these burdens challenges romanticized views of community action, which often place heavy demands on community leaders, many of whom are women and older adults. It also reminds us that community organizing must constantly balance efforts to address broader structural problems with the need to provide practical solutions to people’s immediate needs. Moreover, communities and their leaders should not be expected to absorb the consequences of PRASA’s institutional limitations, Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, and La Junta’s austerity measures. The drought may be a natural emergency, but the water crisis is more than that. It is also the outcome of a colonial system in which debt, austerity, and extraction have shaped the infrastructure on which Puerto Ricans depend. Community organizing may help people survive the crisis, but it should not relieve those who produced it of responsibility.

Mikael E. Rosa Rosa is a full-time lecturer at the Beatriz Lassalle Graduate School of Social Work, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras CampusHe completed doctoral studies at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His research and activist work focus on community organizing, colonialism, and neoliberal governance regimes.

The following article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).