Hurricane Fiona was the second time José Oyola Ríos served as an emergency drinking water provider, after gusting winds and heavy rains battered Puerto Rico on Sunday, causing mass flooding and power outages.
Oyola Ríos serves as a community leader in rural, inland Caguas, in the central mountain range, where he maintains water tanks that store thousands of gallons, known in the area as the “community oasis”.
When Hurricane María battered the island in 2017, hundreds of residents from surrounding towns would drive up the mountainous road to Caguas to get a few gallons of water.
Almost exactly five years later, Oyola Ríos activated his plan once again to distribute potable water to communities left without running water after deadly Hurricane Fiona passed through as a Category 1 storm in the Atlantic hurricane season and swept on with its destructive path towards other Caribbean communities.
“These atmospheric events demonstrate that we haven’t been able to recover,” Oyola Ríos told the Guardian, adding that Fiona “aggravated that reality”.
Slow progress in modernizing Puerto Rico’s water infrastructure has left many residents reliving the trauma experienced when the Category 5 María devastated the 3 million-strong US territory.
Several water filtration systems across the island were inoperable post-Fiona due to turbidity or electrical failures, leaving thousands with an interrupted service because of flooding and outages.
More than 760,000 customers were still without water service on Tuesday morning, according to the government’s portal.
More than half of the water authority’s dams and filtration plants were affected by the hurricane, the president of the Puerto Rico aqueduct and sewer authority, Doriel Pagán, said at a press conference.
Water pumps across the island also depend on electricity to distribute water in elevated areas. Pagán said the water authority continues to place power generators across their systems.
In preparation for the latest hurricane, many residents stocked up on water, canned food, medication and other essentials. It’s unclear how long customers now without utilities will remain without power or water, and whether supplies at home will last.
“This is where a family’s judgment comes in,” said Adamaris Quiñones Rodríguez, president of Puerto Rico water & environment association, a non-profit that focuses on promoting infrastructure rehabilitation. “You might sacrifice a cleaning task in order to have enough water to drink or bathe with.”
Yeseida Garay Cotto, 36, lives in Caguas and depends on a well to obtain potable water because the official water service doesn’t reach her house. When the storm hit on Sunday, all she could hear for hours were rocks tumbling that came from several hillside collapses caused by the torrential downpour.
One of the collapses damaged the well’s pipeline that she, her family and several others in the community depend on.
“We don’t have much clean water, so we’re using the rainwater to wash the dishes and stuff like that,” Garay Cotto told the Guardian. “We have some water we can drink, which should last until we can fix the well.”
In contrast, the island is also prone to severe droughts, further necessitating water infrastructure fit for purpose. Puerto Rico’s latest drought was as recent as this summer, when water sources and reservoirs in the north-eastern part of the island were particularly low.
Some of the reservoirs leak, which the water authority proposed to fix, and water rationing was mandated.
But community leaders like Oyola Ríos lamented that the system is still operating with a vulnerable electricity grid and flawed water system.
The US government’s federal emergency management agency (Fema) assigned about $13.2bn for the recovery of the electrical grid after Hurricane María. Only $40m of those funds have been disbursed so far, Anne Bink, associate administrator of the Office of Response and Recovery at Fema, told a congressional hearing last Thursday.
“While the start could have been faster, we’re starting to see that pivot toward more work, more shovels in the ground,” she said.
Obtaining safe drinking water can be arduous after an atmospheric event of the scope of hurricane.
People must disinfect their water supply by boiling it or using liquid chlorine bleach. Hurricane María exposed the threat of drinking contaminated water after 26 people died of leptospirosis – a potentially deadly bacterial disease largely spread by rats.
Ironically, people who lived closer to a large canal had a higher risk of being infected, a study led by researchers at the Yale school of public health found.
José Ríos Meléndez oversees a group of community aqueducts that provide potable water to areas with unstable water systems.
He said he saw a spike in the construction of such fixtures, especially after Luma Energy, a Canadian-American private company, took over Puerto Rico’s energy transmission and distribution system in 2021.
But frequent power outages in the last year have left communities which rely on electricity to operate the pumps without an efficient water system, as well as basics like lighting and refrigeration, where many store medication as well as food.
Disruptions have been accompanied by repeated increases in electricity bills. Hundreds of protesters gathered last month to demand the cancellation of the contract of Luma Energy, leading to violent clashes with police.
More than 240 community aqueducts, equipped with tanks that hold thousands of gallons of water, are scattered around the island and supply water to thousands of people, and more than 100 of these systems run on solar power.
Many Puerto Ricans are switching to solar for residences and businesses.
Oyola Ríos believes solar energy is an efficient choice, especially as storms become more frequent and fierce.
“If I didn’t had solar panels, I wouldn’t have been able to operate,” Oyola Ríos said. “Even with a power generator, there’s a low supply of diesel.”
