Venezuela: Cities running short of running water due to lack of maintenance, little rain

Ah, the poor citizens of Venezuela make news again.  Food and medicine have been incredibly scarce for three years, and now even water is beginning to work only a couple of days a week.


With water only running one or two days a week even in fairly wealthy areas, residents must hire trucks to fill the storage tanks in their apartment building. With self-imposed rationing, the residents would have water — but only for an hour, three times each day.

Finally they decided to drill their own well alongside their apartment building in the tony Campo Alegre neighborhood near the city's most exclusive country club.

Venezuela's meltdown has been accelerating under President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government, prompting masses of people to abandon the nation in frustration at shortages of food and medicine, street violence, rampant blackouts — and now sputtering faucets.

Meanwhile, the poor struggle with dwindling public water supplies, hoping the sporadic flows will be enough to fill their storage tanks.

Caracas once had a world-class water system, pumping water from far-off reservoirs over towering mountains into the valley that cradles the city.  But a lack of maintenance has crippled the system, as has a lack of rain, experts say.

Officials at Hidrocapital and Venezuela's Ecosocialism and Water Ministry did not respond to requests for comment by The Associated Press.

Most of the private wells are going in illegally. The law requires a permit before drilling starts, but the paperwork can take up to two years, and few are willing to wait. When officials stick their nose in, a building's residents ask the best-connected among them to pull strings.

But drilling isn't an option for the vast majority of Venezuelans who have seen wages pulverized by a collapsing currency and five-digit inflation. The minimum wage amounts to less than $2 a month.

In one of Venezuela's sprawling slums, Carmen Rivero said her neighborhood recently went three months without tap water, and before that, a full eight months. Residents get by filling water barrels from a spring and service from city water trucks.



But by all means listen to Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, and vote Democrat in November.  Cuz that's the fastest path to full socialism.  And when our Democrats do socialism, they'll do it right.