One Puerto Rico condo building, 10 families, no water

NPR | By Adrian Florido

Published August 11, 2026 at 4:23 PM EDT

The lack of running water has forced Sonia Palacios to stretch every drop of water she gets. Often that means not watering her plants. It breaks her heart.

Updated August 13, 2026 at 6:24 PM EDT

SAN JUAN, P.R. – On many days over the past year, the tidy three-story condo building on Pomarrosa Street, in central San Juan, has gotten no running water at all. On other days, just a trickle reaches the faucets – but only in the ground floor apartments.

On those days, the families who live above her bring their jugs down to Sonia Palacios' first-story patio and fill them from her garden hose.

"They know they need no permission to enter when there's water," Palacios, a retired lawyer, said of her upstairs neighbors.

On days when low pressure delivers water to only the first floor, residents of upper floors have permission to fill their jugs from Palacios' garden hose.

People in and around Puerto Rico's capital are settling into exasperating new routines as the island's government has begun rationing water amid a drought that's depleted key reservoirs and exposed the fragility of the island's long-neglected network of pipes.

The 10 families in Palacios' building were among the early casualties of the ballooning crisis. For reasons not entirely clear, they and other buildings in their neighborhood have had intermittent running water for more than a year, long before this summer's drought or last week's formal announcement of the rationing plan. It's upended their lives in ways that will soon be familiar to people in the 180,000 homes and businesses affected by the cuts that will leave them without water on as many as four days a week.

"You're used to having water," Palacios said as she sat among wilting plants that have gone unwatered in her garden. "And so to not have water is like a handicap. I feel like there's nothing I can do."

She now schedules her life, as best she can, around getting water. And she's adjusted her daily routines to stretch every drop she manages to squeeze out of her fickle faucets.

The top priority is filling as many containers as she can when water flows. She often bathes by scooping water out of a plastic barrel in her shower. When washing dishes, she wipes soap off with a paper towel before rinsing, so she can reuse the water in her garden.

Her neighbor, Norma Peña, said she feels tethered to her house, and often skips family gatherings and social events.

"Because it's like, what if the water comes back? Then we have to go back to the house," she said. "Are we going to shower or not? Are we going to do breakfast or not? Am I going to make coffee? Am I going to go to my job clean, or am I going to work from home? The uncertainty is constant."

Water jugs litter the patio of a third-floor apartment, which is too high for water to reach even on days when the first floor gets just a trickle because of low pressure.

When they pass a tap, Peña, her husband and children check them by reflex.

"If you're having trouble sleeping at 4 am, you check the faucet," she said. "The first thing you do when you wake up is check the faucet."

On any given day, the first person in the building to realize water has returned alerts everyone in the residents' group chat, and the scramble to do laundry and clean toilets begins.

Yoamadil Cabán, Norma Peña, Sonia Palacios and Polyana Cabán — neighbors in San Juan who've had to settle into new and frustrating routines after a year of unreliable water service.

People in Puerto Rico are well practiced in the improvisation required to get by in the face of the government's failures providing basic services – power outages, dilapidated roadways and now running water. Many, including in the building on Pomarrosa Street, have tried to make the best of it. They've occasionally thrown little parties after several consecutive days with uninterrupted service.

But another neighbor, Yoamadil Cabán, said the idea that scarcity is just how things are is also something many people on the island are coming to accept, and that concerns her.

"That fact is normalized," she said. "And it cannot be normalized."

A sign demanding water is affixed to the gates outside the condo building — one building among many across Puerto Rico to which the island's public utility has cut running water.

Gov. Jenniffer González Colón has blamed the drought for the current crisis, but many citizens, like Cabán, blame the government for letting the island's network of pipes fall into disrepair and accuse it of mismanagement. The government's own data shows 60 percent of its treated water is lost to leaks and other inefficiencies, exacerbating the drought's effects on water supply.

"Where's the accountability?" Cabán asked. "Who assumes responsibility for the water that is lost?"

She thinks the growing water problems could knock people out of the complacency many have settled into over the state of the island's basic infrastructure.

"You never think about what it's like not to have water until you don't have it," said her 11th-grade daughter, Polyana. "Water is essential to do anything. It really changes your habits, and structure, in day to day life."