At 6:00 this morning, the Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados began rationing water in the San Juan metro area. Not an outage, not an “operational adjustment” — a published plan that alternates service between two zones, two days on and two days off, across sectors of San Juan, Trujillo Alto, Carolina, Canóvanas, Loíza, Gurabo and Juncos. This analysis ties together two months of our coverage: how the island got here, what AAA’s plan actually says, and what to do about it. For the live zone schedule, the drought map and the sector lists, keep our water page bookmarked — it computes which zone is in its service window right now.
The story so far
The metro area’s water summer started breaking in June, when a failed 48-inch pipe left much of the region dry before repairs were completed on June 19. Behind the repairs sat a bigger problem: no rain. By early July the governor was warning that 13 municipalities could face rationing, and a second repair setback briefly left 188,000 customers without water — a preview, it turns out, of what the drought would make routine. San Juan residents were already protesting outages with pot-banging and honking while residential cistern demand doubled.
The rain never came. A late-July trough dropped up to two inches in places and changed nothing; July 2026 closed as San Juan’s driest on record. On July 30, the governor announced a state of emergency — freezing cistern prices, enabling the National Guard, and streamlining water transport. By August 2 a second reservoir had fallen to operational-adjustment level, dredging was being pushed as a mitigation, and the drought had begun reaching into food prices through the island’s farms. The full running thread is on our water crisis timeline.
The scale is islandwide even though the rationing is metro: the U.S. Drought Monitor’s August 4 map puts 60 of 78 municipios in moderate drought or worse — 35 severe or worse — with the entire south coast, Cabo Rojo to Yauco to Salinas, in extreme drought. Our town-by-town drought map carries the exact share for every municipio, updated each week.
The plan, in plain terms
AAA’s plan — published as an official document, which is where every fact in this section comes from — covers customers of the Sergio Cuevas filtration plant in Trujillo Alto, the system fed by the Carraízo reservoir that serves roughly 180,000 clients. Sectors are grouped into Zone 1 and Zone 2, AAA’s own designations.
The rotation opened this morning with Zone 1 receiving water and Zone 2 dry; every 48 hours, valves close on one zone and open on the other, always at 6:00 AM.
That is Phase 1. The document also publishes a Phase 2 that AAA activates only if reservoir levels keep falling: 72-hour interruptions — one day with water, three days without, including one full day with the entire system out of operation. Phase 2 is not in effect. Whether it ever is depends on Carraízo, and on rain.
Two practical cautions. The 6:00 AM switch is a valve maneuver, not a light switch — pressure returns gradually, high ground last. And the plan is AAA’s to change: treat any specific hour as approximate and verify against official announcements, or your municipality’s emergency management office (the OMME numbers are on our water page).
What it means in practice
Know your zone. The zone split runs street by street, not town by town — San Juan has sectors in both zones. AAA’s sector lists are transcribed verbatim on our water page, organized by municipality, with the coming switches laid out on a calendar strip.
Store ahead of your dry window. Ready.gov’s planning figure is one gallon per person per day — more for children, the elderly, the sick, and pets. Fill containers you can seal, before your zone’s window closes.
If you run out, AAA is staging water trucks and refill points from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM at nine sites from Naguabo to Toa Baja — the list is on the water page.
Watch your bill. AAA adjusted bills for customers who lost service in June. Track the days your sector spends dry.
Report leaks. A broken pipe running during rationing is water nobody gets. AAA customer service: (787) 620-2482.
What we’re watching
Three things decide how this ends. Carraízo’s level — the daily AAA monitoring reports we cover tell you whether Phase 1 is holding the line. The Phase 2 trigger — AAA has not published a threshold, only the phase itself; any announcement will lead our coverage the morning it happens. Rain — the seasonal outlook matters more than any valve. Until one of those breaks the right way, the metro area’s water arrives on a schedule, and the schedule is on the water page.