There’s a news story that seems to have been buried in the headlines. That is, unless you specifically search for it on Google. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that if a story isn’t everywhere, it’s because the mainstream media simply doesn’t care. We’re talking about the water crisis in Puerto Rico.

During the past few weeks, more than 180,000 households across San Juan and its surrounding municipalities, all of them United States citizens, have been washing their hair once every two weeks. They’ve been surviving on bottled water and whatever they can catch from the city’s emergency trucks.

Unfortunately, living surrounded by water but without access to drinking water is not an unfamiliar irony for Puerto Ricans. But what is going on?

A Drought Is Only Part of the Story

Governor Jenniffer González-Colón declared an island-wide state of emergency in late July. She did so after San Juan recorded its driest July in more than 120 years, dating back to 1899. Beginning August 7, the island’s water authority started shutting off service on a rotating 48-hour schedule across seven municipalities, including San Juan, Carolina, Juncos, Gurabo, Trujillo Alto, Canóvanas, and Loíza. Officials have warned that the outages could last up to 72 hours at a time. More than 500,000 people are living under those rotating shutoffs. And more than 60 percent of the territory, over 3 million residents, is under some form of drought designation.

“This situation is out of our hands,” González-Colón said when she announced the rationing. “Nothing prevents this from worsening.”

However, that argument is not completely accurate.

If This Is a U.S. Territory, Why Is This Happening?

Puerto Rico has been a United States territory since 1898, and its residents have been U.S. citizens since 1917. That status is central to understanding the Island’s reality and the government’s response to the crisis (or lack thereof).

First, let’s talk about the infrastructure itself. Félix Aponte Ortiz, a leading water management expert, told The New York Times that as much as 60 percent of the water in Puerto Rico’s system never reaches a customer’s tap. “There’s an emphasis on producing more water and on rehabbing the big infrastructure,” he said. “But not so much in updating pipes.” Charlotte Gossett Navarro, the Puerto Rico chief director for the Hispanic Federation, gave the Los Angeles Times a similar assessment. “We’re talking about years where we have seen that infrastructure be aged and Puerto Rico not making the investments necessary to maintain it,” she said. In May, a major pipe break left more than 100,000 people in the metro area without water for over a week. This repair was supposed to be routine. Instead, it became, in her words, “a much bigger repair project than they originally expected.”

Puerto Rican journalist Manuel Guillama Capella called a spade a spade in El Nuevo Día, the island’s most-read newspaper. “For more than three decades, the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority has staggered from one crisis to the next,” he wrote, citing fiscal crises, failed privatizations, and poor planning. The agency’s own unionized employees went on strike this month. They argued they can no longer live on $10.50 an hour, according to Yale Climate Connections.

None of it is new information to anyone in power or to the people living on the island.

Puerto Rico endured major droughts in 1994, 2015, and 2023, plus another in 2020 that forced its own round of rationing. A climate resilience plan, drafted with input from Puerto Rican scientists and released in 2024, already laid out what needed to happen to prepare for exactly this scenario. The legislature has not approved it. Therefore, climate change is compounding the neglect, not causing it outright. This year’s El Niño pattern and rising Caribbean temperatures have driven faster evaporation and less predictable rainfall. Still, the system was already losing more than half its water through decades-old leaks before a single reservoir dropped.

Who’s Actually to Blame?

Puerto Ricans have made it clear they don’t accept the governor’s framing that the situation is “out of our hands.” Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of the Hispanic Federation, told the Los Angeles Times that the González-Colón administration “was aware of the issue and failed to prevent what was an already intolerable situation.” The board president of the island’s water authority resigned on August 6, saying the government never consulted the utility before rolling out its rationing plan. As of early August, the administration still hadn’t convened the scientific committee that state law requires it to convene in exactly this kind of emergency, according to reporting by The Cut’s Andrea González-Ramírez.

The hypocrisy has been hard for residents to ignore.

Even as the governor told islanders that washing cars and watering plants was limiting the water supply, Puerto Ricans say they’ve spotted sprinklers running on private golf courses, hotel grounds, and the lawn of El Morro. Weeks into the crisis, her administration approved a $2 billion luxury development in Cabo Rojo. Opponents warn it could strain water access for the town’s own residents. “There’s some real cognitive dissonance going on,” Jossie Valentín, who co-runs a tour company in San Juan, told The Cut. “You need to go save water, but we’re going to go approve a project like Esencia.”

But accountability doesn’t stop at the governor’s office.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez released a joint statement this week arguing that the crisis is “the result of federal neglect and mismanagement,” noting that almost $30 billion in federal disaster grant assistance sits in limbo, awaiting disbursement, while residents ration water by the bucket. They also singled out FEMA’s policy of requiring Puerto Rico to pay for infrastructure repairs upfront and seek reimbursement afterward, calling it “the cruel policy.” Gossett Navarro made a related point to the Los Angeles Times: this isn’t only a story about money that was never allocated. More than $7 billion in federal grants and low-interest loans have already been awarded for Puerto Rico’s water infrastructure, with hundreds of those projects still in development and unfinished, according to CBS News. If you do the math, you quickly realize that money and mismanagement are not separate problems. They’re the same one.

Why Isn’t This Making Bigger Headlines?

The honest answer is that national outlets have covered this story. The New York Times, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, and others have all sent reporters or run coverage on the rationing. But covering something is one thing; treating it as a domestic emergency is another, and Puerto Ricans keep noticing the difference. “Anywhere else in the United States, that would be a crisis,” Rafael Alvarez Febo, co-founder of the Puerto Rican Professionals Network, said at a rally in Philadelphia. “That would warrant national news, and that would warrant national response.”

And that’s a painful truth, right there.

The Colorado River’s decline has driven years of sustained national coverage and congressional fights over water rights among seven states. Puerto Rico’s crisis, affecting a comparable population of U.S. citizens, often appears as a single line in broader global roundups. A recent Guardian column on the world’s worsening water crisis mentioned Puerto Rico in a single sentence, in the same breath as dry rivers in Europe and shrinking reservoirs in the American West, before moving on to bombed desalination plants in the Middle East.

“We get mad, we see this terrible thing that happened to Puerto Rico, we’re upset about it, and then there’s new news,” Gossett Navarro told the Los Angeles Times. “We turn the page, and we don’t hear about it again until a new crisis hits Puerto Rico.” For the island’s residents, this is a nauseating déjà vu after Hurricane Maria, after the 2015 and 2020 droughts, after every blackout across a power grid that fails on a schedule of its own.

What Living Through It Actually Looks Like

More than 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s population lives in poverty, according to Hunter College’s Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, which makes bottled water and backup cisterns a real financial strain. Health officials have also warned that the lack of running water increases the risk of gastrointestinal illness and mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, on top of the mental toll.

In the end, what’s kept many neighborhoods functioning is each other. Community group chats alert neighbors when a water truck is coming or when the pipes briefly turn back on. Grassroots organizers have started building what Gossett Navarro calls community resiliency hubs, spaces with solar power, generators, and shared kitchens that don’t depend on the same failing systems. While admirable, this is a resilience Boricuas have had to build after every disaster of the last decade, and it’s also, as more than one resident pointed out, a burden that shouldn’t be theirs to carry alone.

Tags: Puerto Rico