Daily Water Watch: La Plata at 44.47 m

Day 50 of the metro rotation plan — interruptions paused since September 2, AAA has not canceled the plan. This morning’s 5:00 chart from the Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados shows Carraízo at 40.67 meters — down 1 centimeter from yesterday, and La Plata at 44.47 meters — down 9 centimeters from yesterday.

This is the 45th entry in our daily chart check (yesterday’s is here), built the same way every morning — from AAA’s own numbers, read off its charts for our reservoir board.

Carraízo: down 1 cm

Carraízo kept sliding. This morning’s chart puts it at 40.67 meters — down 1 centimeter from yesterday, in the seguridad band. The next line on the chart — into the observación band — sits at 39.70 meters, 0.97 meters below this morning’s reading.

La Plata: down 9 cm

La Plata kept sliding. This morning’s chart puts it at 44.47 meters — down 9 centimeters from yesterday, in the ajustes band. The next line on the chart — into the control band — sits at 40.50 meters, 3.97 meters below this morning’s reading. At AAA’s printed pace that is roughly 44.1 days out (straight-line date: Nov 10 — a projection, not a forecast; one wet afternoon moves it).

If your water comes from La Plata — Dorado, Guaynabo, Naranjito, Toa Alta, Toa Baja, Vega Alta, Bayamón, Cataño, Corozal — this is the reservoir to watch; AAA lists 130,828 client accounts on it.

What the numbers say

Carraízo’s slide has eased dramatically from last week’s steep 27.7 cm-a-day pace to 2.3 cm a day now, but it’s still headed the wrong direction, with rain gauges nearby logging just 0.05 in this week — not enough to change the arithmetic. That math points to the observación line arriving around November 8 if the current pace holds, a projection rather than a prediction. La Plata is falling faster than it was, up from 5.8 cm a day to 3.2 cm a day, and has now dropped for four straight mornings. Its 0.06 in of rain this week did nothing to slow that slide.

Cidra is the outlier: essentially flat this week, a slowdown from the 4.7 cm-a-day pace it carried before, even with 0.59 in of rain falling nearby — more than the other two reservoirs combined saw. That flatness means no near-term arithmetic points to the ajustes line below. Across the three, the pattern is consistent: rain this week was too light almost everywhere to reverse declines, and the pace of loss is easing at Carraízo and Cidra while accelerating at La Plata, which is the one to watch for any signal of approaching its next lower band.

What to watch

• Río Grande, Canóvanas and Loíza: whether AAA says in public that the east-side rationing is over, and posts that the Canóvanas filtration plant is back in operation.

The other rationing reservoir

Numbers from AAA’s Monitoreo Diario chart of Sep 26, read each morning for our reservoir board — where the levels, the bands, and the live rain gauges update daily. Rain figures are USGS gauges within 12 km of each reservoir (a proximity proxy, not a basin measurement). Day counts start Aug 8, when the metro rotation took effect. Straight-line dates are arithmetic, not forecasts. The analysis paragraphs are drafted by Claude from the computed figures and checked number-by-number against them before publishing.