Puerto Rico Starts 48-Hour Water Shutoffs With No End Date After Board Chair Quits

More than 180,000 customers woke up to dry taps. That is the number that matters most in Puerto Rico this week, because behind each customer account is a household, and behind those households are what CBS News counted as hundreds of thousands of people in San Juan and surrounding communities waking up Friday without running water. ⁸¹¹²

The Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, known as PRASA or AAA, began rotating shutoffs on Friday, August 7, 2026, cutting service for 48 hours at a time to neighborhoods in San Juan and other major cities. ⁸¹¹² The utility described an emergency shaped by severe drought with "no relief in sight," a phrase that has defined both the weather forecast and the public mood. ⁸¹¹

The scale did not arrive out of nowhere. San Juan just recorded its driest July since record-keeping began in 1898, with just a half-inch of rain for the entire month. ⁹ Forecasters and local officials link the failure of the rains to an intense El Niño, which has deepened drought across the island and drained the reservoirs and rivers that feed the metropolitan system. ³⁹

What turned a drought emergency into a political crisis happened the day before the taps were turned off. On August 6, 2026, Héctor del Río Jiménez resigned as chairman of the PRASA board of governors over the handling of the rationing plan. ³⁵ In his resignation, he said the decision regarding the scheduled service interruptions affecting 180,000 citizens "was not discussed with the governing body of the public corporation." ³⁵

That single sentence did lasting damage. It told customers that the most disruptive water decision in recent memory had bypassed the utility's own governing body, and it arrived only hours before the 48-hour rotations were to begin. ³⁵ His resignation "intensified public scrutiny" of the utility's crisis management, and political leaders demanded transparency about how the plan was drawn, who approved it, and what comes next. ⁵

By Friday morning, the abstraction of a rationing plan had become concrete. CBS News described hundreds of thousands of people in the capital and surrounding communities waking up with no running water, under a headline quoting a resident: "It's brutal." ² NBC News reported that by the time rationing was formally announced, some islanders had already lacked water for over a week, a reminder that the official start date was not the start of hardship. ⁶

PRASA has not said when the rationing will end. ⁸¹¹ The agency said service recovery after each shutoff "will vary" and be gradual because the system was "completely empty for several days," requiring the slow refilling of pipes and pumping stations before pressure can be restored. ⁷ In Cupey, one of the areas cited by the utility as it reported on restoration, officials emphasized that reopening the valves does not mean immediate water at the tap. ⁷

That uncertainty is the second crisis. A 48-hour shutoff is not 48 hours without water and then normal life resumes; empty networks suck in air, lose pressure, and must be refilled section by section, with higher elevations and the ends of lines waiting longest. ⁷ When PRASA says recovery will be gradual, it is acknowledging that the infrastructure cannot simply be switched back on. ⁷

The drought has also exposed what PBS described as the island's aging water infrastructure and lack of immediate government action. ⁴ Puerto Rico's water system, like its power grid, has endured years of underinvestment, storm damage, and deferred maintenance, leaving little margin when reservoirs fall. The current rationing does not create that fragility, but it makes it impossible to hide. ⁴

There is also a numbers problem that matters for how the public understands the emergency. The Associated Press and El Nuevo Día cite more than 180,000 customers affected by the scheduled interruptions. ³⁸¹¹ CBS News describes hundreds of thousands of people waking up without water. ² Those figures are not contradictory: one counts customer accounts, largely households, while the other counts the people who live with those accounts. But the gap between a utility's customer table and a family's kitchen sink helps explain the anger — the plan sounds technical until the tap sputters.