JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Puerto Rico has been hit by one crisis after another. Most memorable, perhaps - 2017's Hurricane Maria that took the lives of almost 3,000 Americans.
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ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: A lot of the island has lost all electricity, all running water. But because of the road obstructions, just basic relief like water and food is just now arriving in significant quantities.
ROSE: That's NPR's Adrian Florido reporting from the interior of Puerto Rico more than a month after Maria barreled across the island. He's been there to cover its challenges and triumphs ever since. He's documented political mobilizations.
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FLORIDO: That sort of broad participation that's happening here, sparked by people's just absolutely being fed up with the way politics works here.
ROSE: When an earthquake rocked Puerto Rico in 2020, Adrian was there.
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FLORIDO: These aftershocks have been a destabilizing force ever since that initial big quake on Tuesday. Officials fear that with each of these aftershocks, homes and other buildings that were damaged by that initial big quake are being weakened.
ROSE: When thousands of Puerto Ricans returned to the island to hear favorite son Bad Bunny in concert, Adrian was there, too.
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FLORIDO: The concert is titled "No Me Quiero Ir De Aqui" - "I Don't Want To Leave Here." For 3 hours, San Juan's biggest concert arena pulsates with the rhythms and traditions of Puerto Rican culture.
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ROSE: Most recently, Adrian has been reporting on the island's water crisis this summer.
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FLORIDO: Although Puerto Rico officially began rationing water last week, many people have been coping with dry taps for months now.
ROSE: So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to dig into his experiences covering Puerto Rico. I started by asking him what caused the water shortages.
FLORIDO: Depends on who you ask. The governor says it's because of the drought that is affecting Puerto Rico right now. You go around and you see trees dying, foliage turning brown and water levels in the Island's key reservoirs depleting very quickly, and that is the problem. They've had to cut water service to people's homes because the water is running out because of the drought. It's just not raining, is what the government says.
That is true. It is in a drought, Puerto Rico. It is not raining, but it's not the only reason that Puerto Rico does not have water. Puerto Rico's infrastructure is in really bad shape. And the pipes and valves that carry water to its 3 million people are deteriorating and have been deteriorating for decades.
And I saw this so clearly one day when I was walking around San Juan, looking for people to interview who didn't have water and came upon a woman who I started talking to who was really angry because the house next door to hers, which was abandoned, had a little broken pipe in the middle of the yard that had been leaking water for a year. And water was just being wasted 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a long, long time, and she had not been able to get the water utility to come out and fix it.
And she said, this is just one trickle of water coming out of one pipe. But you walk around Puerto Rico, and you see it everywhere, everywhere. And it's true. You see water leaking out of broken pipes in abandoned houses, at beaches where people use showers to rinse off the sand, all over the place.
ROSE: How did things get this bad in Puerto Rico?
FLORIDO: That's a big question, and there's a lot of reasons for it. You could go back a long ways and talk about the history of Puerto Rico as a colony of the United States. You could also start more recently with Puerto Rico's budget crisis, which left Puerto Rico with massive amounts of debt that led it to declare bankruptcy and have basically eviscerated its ability to pay for public services, to maintain infrastructure. And that's a big part of the problem. Puerto Rico's infrastructure has not been maintained for decades, and that's true of the water system.
You know, the water system in Puerto Rico is not a sexy thing to be, you know, your issue if you are a public official. It's quite literally underground. Nobody sees it until there's a problem. And so that hasn't always been the focus of the government - maintaining it, and it hasn't been maintained.
Puerto Rico also has faced a lot of austerity imposed by a federal oversight board that took control of Puerto Rico's finances about 10 years ago, which has cut funding to public agencies as a way to try to get Puerto Rico out of its debt crisis. And so there's just not that much money to do maintenance. That's another part of the problem. There are a lot of reasons. Those are a couple of the key ones.
ROSE: You know, often reporters will parachute in from the mainland to cover a big story like this. But you have been in Puerto Rico regularly covering stories on the ground for a long time now. Can you just tell us, how did that start for you?
FLORIDO: It started in 2017 after Hurricane Maria. I had never been there before and went out and did what we do, which is we sort of arrive at a place that we don't know anything about and start reporting stories. And I quickly realized that the story of Puerto Rico's recovery from Maria was going to be a really long-term story in the way that the recovery in New Orleans after Katrina was a long-term story that has never stopped being a story. It is still a story today.
ROSE: Right, and it's not just about the hurricane. It's about everything that was a problem in New Orleans before the hurricane.
FLORIDO: Right. And Maria became a story not just about the problems that Maria brought, but the problems that Maria exposed that were actually long festering in Puerto Rico. And so aside from the fact that Puerto Rico is a beautiful place with beautiful people, it's just a journalistically fascinating place. And so I decided never to let it go (laughter). And I'm still there reporting on a lot of this stuff 10 years later.
ROSE: How often are you there?
FLORIDO: Well, I split my time. I actually live there part time, and so I'm there quite a lot.
ROSE: I want to focus on one story that you wrote recently about the water crisis, which focuses on the residents of a single building in San Juan. How did you find these people and this story?
FLORIDO: Well, I went to a protest. People were protesting the water cuts, and I went to a protest, and I approached a woman who was holding a sign and asked her, do you have water? And she said, no. And I said, can you show me? And she said, sure, let's go to my house. And so we hopped into her car, and she drove me to her apartment. And we went into her apartment, and she was showing me how, in the bathroom, she has a plastic barrel that she fills with water whenever she does get running water so that when she doesn't, she can bathe by scooping water out of it with some tupperware.
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FLORIDO: And in the kitchen, after she or her husband boil an egg, they let the water cool for the dog.
NORMA PENA: (Speaking Spanish). You have to reuse the water, especially the one used for cooking.
FLORIDO: What's his name?
PENA: This is Luna.
FLORIDO: Luna, her name - so she drinks egg-flavored water sometimes.
PENA: Si.
FLORIDO: One apartment building, 10 families navigating Puerto Rico's water crisis, drinking egg-flavored water and finding other creative ways to use every drop.
ROSE: What was the big takeaway for you from reporting on this latest water crisis and this drought that maybe would inform what you do in your future assignments?
FLORIDO: Well, I think it's that Puerto Rico's water crisis is connected to so many of Puerto Rico's other issues - socially, politically, structurally, culturally. One thing that Puerto Ricans have been concerned about and protesting for years now is this growing pressure that people from there who maybe don't have as much money to afford to stay there are facing a lot of the gentrification that's happening there.
A lot of Puerto Rico's economic strategy right now revolves around attracting higher-income people to move there from other places. That requires building. So there's, like - you walk around San Juan now, and you see a lot of high-rise, luxury apartment buildings going up. And at some of these protests, you know, people would point to them and say, we don't have enough water for ourselves. How are we building these huge buildings for rich people to come and live and take more of the water for them?
There's a massive development being proposed and well on its way to approval on the west coast of Puerto Rico called Esencia, which is going to be essentially a mini-city that's going to require huge amounts of water for the golf courses, for these luxury apartments. So, you know, I think that's one of the things I'm going to be following is how these water shortages and the infrastructural problems that are causing it are connected to a lot of these other struggles in Puerto Rico.
ROSE: That is NPR's Adrian Florido. Adrian, thanks for your reporting, and thanks for joining us.
FLORIDO: Thanks, Joel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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