The Myth of the Open Tap

Puerto Rico is rationing water right now.

More than 180,000 customers on the island are going without running water for 48-hour stretches, on a rotating schedule, while officials wait for rain that isn’t coming. July was San Juan’s driest month in over 120 years. But drought is only half the story. An estimated 59% of all treated water on the island never reaches a resident. It leaks out of pipes that have been failing for decades. A 72-inch aqueduct line in Bayamón ruptured at three separate points and helped trigger the current crisis.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. Its residents are U.S. citizens. And for over a month this summer, some of them didn’t have water at all.

Most Americans would call that unthinkable. Water is supposed to just be there. Turn the handle, it comes out, forever, everywhere in this country.

It isn’t even true in this country.

Three weeks before Puerto Rico’s rationing began, four groundwater wells failed in Anaheim, California, and every bathroom at Disneyland went dark for two hours. Guests lined up for toilets instead of rides. It made headlines because it happened to Disney, but it happened because Disneyland has no water supply of its own. It never has. It runs on the same municipal grid as the strip mall down the street, and when four of the city’s wells went down, so did the Happiest Place on Earth.

Now go three thousand miles east. Walt Disney World has its own wells. Its own wastewater treatment plant. Its own reclaimed water system irrigating five golf courses and a tree farm. It’s a functioning independent utility because, in 1967, Florida handed Disney the legal powers of a county government to build one.

Why the difference? Disney learned its lesson in Anaheim first. Friction with a city government it didn’t control, and it made sure it never had to depend on someone else’s pipes again. Every park Disney has built since Florida, it’s built with that leverage. Every park it built before, including the original, it never got the chance.

Here’s the thing worth sitting with: Disney choosing to depend on someone else’s water grid was optional. Millions of people don’t have that choice.

• Roughly 30% of households on the Navajo Nation have no tap or toilet at all — not intermittent service, none.

• Native American households are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing than the national average.

• The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the federal government isn’t obligated to secure water rights for the Navajo Nation, despite treaty language dating to 1868.

• In parts of Texas, families along the border pay hundreds of dollars a month for trucked water they can’t verify is safe.

• In Alabama’s Black Belt, soil conditions make septic systems unworkable, and raw sewage surfaces in yards.

• At least 2 million Americans live without a tap or a toilet at home. Some estimates put the real number as high as 9 to 10 million.

2.1 billion people — 1 in 4 humans alive — lack managed drinking water at home safely. 3.4 billion lack safe sanitation.

There’s a technical term for water that runs less than 24 hours a day, or not every day of the week: intermittent water supply. At least 45 countries run systems built this way.

Intermittent supply isn’t a poverty problem. It’s an infrastructure problem, and money doesn’t automatically fix it.

• Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries on Earth by GDP per capita. As of the most recent public data, Riyadh got piped water once every 2.5 days. Jeddah, once every 9. An entire private tanker industry exists to fill the gap. Trucks, apps, 1-hour emergency delivery, and it’s thriving today, not a relic of a past crisis.

• Kuwait has essentially zero natural renewable freshwater and survives almost entirely on desalination, despite topping global rankings for wealth per capita.

• Malta is the only EU country that shows up on global rankings for worst freshwater access.

• Barbados is the only country in the Americas on that same list.

• The Dominican Republic has decent water access on paper. 86% of the population has an improved source, but national continuity of supply sits at just 10%. Nine out of ten connections don’t run continuously, even when the pipe reaches the house.

No water system is designed to be intermittent. It becomes that way through decades of overexpansion, leakage, and infrastructure that never caught up to demand. The exact same failure mode, whether the country in question is broke or one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.

Disney spent sixty years and untold billions making sure it would never again depend on a pipe it didn’t own. Most of the world doesn’t get that option. Neither does Puerto Rico, as of this summer.

Forward this to someone in the water industry who should be paying more attention.

— Richard h2otrends.com