Being in Puerto Rico has provided me with new ways to understand water. First, I learned about cisterns. Growing up on Long Island, I’d never considered that water would cease to flow from the tap and that you might want to have a large store of it backed up, just in case. I was spoiled. Now I know that without a cistern, I will have to lug buckets to a municipal water truck, stand in line with my neighbors, fill them with a hose, and carry them back home up a hill. I learned about how you want to keep your dirty mop water ready to flush the toilet if the water goes out. Despite eschewing them years ago and always refilling my reusable bottle from a refrigerator filter, plastic bottles of water—from small ones for drinking to three-liters for bathing to gallons for cleaning—now line the storage closet like soldiers at the ready. 

In the last year, I’ve learned what it’s like to spend upwards of five days without running water but often there are short periods when it goes out without warning. I will be cooking dinner and turn on the faucet mindlessly to rinse my hands; nothing will come out of the tap. I’ll go to take a shower and find out I’ll have to spend a sweaty 90-degree day feeling grimy. I’ll long to have a clean floor but have to watch the dirt accumulate. We have the bottles lined up yet we fear the moment when we’ll really have to rely on them. There will be rumors swirling around town about when the water is going to come back. I’ve learned never to have any expectations and just be pleasantly surprised when the faucet makes the gurgling noise that says the pipes have something to push once again.

Five days is nothing, though: I’m lucky to be in the affluent, heavily touristed neighborhood of Old San Juan. In Santurce, Café Regina has made its ongoing water outages a matter of public art on their window, announcing that they’ve operated without water for over a hundred days in 2026. This summer has seen a long drought that is exacerbating the situation, but it is not its cause: Poor maintenance of infrastructure and politicians who don’t focus on cultivating a good life or economy for people who actually live here started a water crisis that climate change has made worse. We kicked Ricky out in 2019 and the politicians have only gotten worse; the living conditions have only gotten worse.

All of this is boring, really. It feels boring to live. I used to feel anger, I used to feel fear, but I am exhausted now. I walk the dog with noise-canceling headphones on and push my way through the hordes of people lining up to take pictures with murals, the same pictures with murals thousands have already taken. I take pictures every weekend of the plastic cups they leave strewn all over. I watch when I leave the house to make sure I won’t trip on someone’s mojito that they left there at 2 a.m. I’m intentionally imbuing this piece with the feeling of monotony that marks daily life through infrastructure collapse and overtourism and a piss-poor economy.

Local residents who are already stretched to pay for increasing rent, grocery costs, and energy bills now have to make sure they have excess water in their homes. Businesses announce they will have to close or serve everything in to-go cups, increasing their costs as well as plastic and paper waste. 

While the extent of this crisis is hitting Puerto Rico particularly hard, water stress is not a new phenomenon, and it is being exacerbated worldwide by aging infrastructure, overuse by industrial animal agriculture, climate change, and the obsessive expansion of data centers throughout the world to cool these operations that fuel AI use. I grew up taking water for granted. Who will have that luxury in the future? 

“Water stress” refers to conditions when people and land have insufficient water available for their needs, whether because it’s not potable or it’s inaccessible. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development put out a study in 2025 that noted drought is increasingly becoming an issue globally, saying that this isn’t just about whether water is coming out of our taps at home but how dry years decrease crop yield, causing food scarcity. Five years of low rainfall in the Horn of Africa, they write, “left 23 million people in severe hunger in 2023.” 

While the clear evidence of how catastrophic drought can be should be causing more concern around using water wisely and efficiently, and protecting natural resources by seeking out less water-intensive ways of growing and providing food, data centers are instead being built in places where extreme heat and water stress are already being experienced. Politico reported on research from First Street that notes, “Extreme heat and water scarcity create sustained pressure on operating costs, cooling efficiency, and capacity utilization.” 

These organizations are concerned with the economic effects of crises; it should tell you quite a lot about climate change that people with money are watching it in order to know what to do. People with money believe that it’s real.

The human and ecological tolls are easy enough to see: From Corpus Christi, Texas, a city that almost saw its reservoirs depleted in a state where hundreds of data centers are planned to be built; to India, which has “a population that represents about 18 per cent of the global total but has access to only 4 per cent of the world's freshwater resources”; to the Western U.S. whose water is supplied by the drying-out Colorado River, water is swiftly becoming a frontier of fear for more and more regular people.

It’s everywhere, a cancer: NPR recently reported on the situation in Europe. “Switzerland's glaciers lost more than 5% of their ice in 2026, marking another year of rapid decline. The loss reflects a wider global trend: Glaciers around the world have been shrinking at increasingly rapid rates, a phenomenon scientists link directly to global warming.” And that has downstream effects: “…these huge ice fields are often called Europe's water towers.”

Without water, yes, we can’t quench our thirst or shower or wash our pots and pans or clean our clothes and floors—but it also means food can’t grow. Its scarcity has a very visceral impact on one’s sense of security and well-being.

The U.S. government declared that Puerto Rico’s drought is an emergency on August 26, which will allow farmers to access emergency loans (loans!). July was the driest month on record for the archipelago in 120 years, and over 30 percent of the colony is experiencing a severe drought. If the water infrastructure were properly invested in and maintained, this drought would still be a disaster—but it would be manageable. Instead, there is the constant anxiety that if you have running water, it might leave at any moment, so keep everything clean and keep those bottles stocked. One never knows when the water we take for granted will be transformed into a luxury.