Water Security for Everyone – Por Los Nuestros

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, rural communities spent months without running water because they couldn’t power their water wells.

Moving From Relief to Recovery

Six months after Maria — Alexander Rodriguez — a young chemistry PhD candidate and water expert, knew that something had to change.

Alexander works for Por Los Nuestros, a non-profit organization that started out of a desire to help the people of the island restore and rebuild. Post-Maria, a group of citizens led by journalist Jay Fonseca, entrepreneur Manolo Cidre, Dr. Francisco Arraiza Antonmattei, and attorneys Anabelle Torres Colberg and Nick Pastrana Villafañe, started mobilizing funds to get real solutions to pressing problems through their first project: community solar laundries.

These laundries were created in seven communities to provide accessible washing and drying to affected families with the donations of Whirlpool for the washers and dryers, Procter and Gamble for the detergent, and German company Sonnen for the solar energy batteries. These laundries were important due to the challenges some of these communities would otherwise encounter, having to wash their clothes in unsafe rivers and creeks.

After successfully implementing solar laundries in affected areas, Alexander knew they were barely scratching the surface of the water scarcity dilemma.

The project had been a success and the group wanted to do more.

“That wasn’t going to solve the problem. We needed real solutions. We needed to change the mentality. We couldn’t keep doing relief, we needed to start doing recovery” he recalls.

Water Filtration for Communities in Need

The next frontier was empowering communities by installing their own water filtration systems.

“Our thought process was: these people don’t have water, let’s bring them bottled water. So we coordinated efforts and we brought these communities bottled water. Afterward we realized, that wasn’t a sustainable way. So we moved to create more permanent solutions” comments Nick Pastrana, one of the organization’s board members.

Por Los Nuestros partnered with the grass-roots foundation Waves for Water to create stationary gravity water filtration systems that could filter up to 600 gallons of water per day.

They chose the municipality of Orocovis in the Central Mountain region of the island. From the municipalities they had researched, Orocovis was one of the most affected by lack of water availability. A month after Maria, only 20% of the town had running water.

In the hurricane aftermath, the average Orocovian averaged 6 months without water.

The situation was dire and a water crisis was brewing.

Changing The Vision

The affected communities in Orocovis didn’t have access to the water supply because they weren’t connected to the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA.) Up to 12% of the island’s rural areas are disconnected from the island’s main water provider. Out of this 12%, 5% rely on power-operated wells that become extremely vulnerable to power outages, and without power, there is no water.

Instead, these cut-off communities source their water from nearby streams or from energy-powered water wells. For both of these systems, having electric power is essential. This is where Por Los Nuestros came in.

“To recover we had to change our vision. The people that were coming in and using our solar laundries, or washing their clothes in the river didn’t have water in their homes. That was the root of the problem” Rodriguez commented.

With the aid of funding from Direct Relief, the group began to energize three pilot non-PRASA solar-powered water systems in Orocovis, providing water sourcing relief to over 1,500 people. This was just the beginning of their next project: water security for non-PRASA communities.

Building Resilient Water Systems

Por Los Nuestros realized that to solve the root of the problem they would need to create sustainable water pump systems that would work independently from the island’s fragile power grid, and from Puerto Rico’s Aqueduct and Sewer Authority.

Currently, there are 242 communities that are unable to source their water from the island’s Aqueduct and Sewer Authority. And according to Alexander, it’s an issue of efficiency and altitude. Most of these communities are in mountainous regions where pumping water upward is a challenge.

The team quickly leaped into action.

With the assistance of Blue Planet Energy providing solar energy batteries for the non-PRASA communities water systems— through a grant from AbbVie to Direct Relief — Por Los Nuestros successfully developed 14 solar-powered aqueduct systems, with the goal of installing and running a total of 25 systems by the end of this year.

Thus far, water systems have been successfully installed in: Yabucoa, Las Piedras, San Lorenzo, Caguas, Cidra, and Comerío. Communities in Cayey, Yauco, Naranjito, and Aguas Buenas are in process, with other areas in Ponce awaiting for community efforts.

As a water quality expert that worked directly with these communities after hurricane Maria, Rodriguez understands on a visceral level the importance of having clean, running water available. It’s not a mere luxury, but a major necessity. With lack of clean water, there’s an increased likelihood of drinking, bathing, and washing with contaminated water sources which bring forth a host of health issues.

The solar-powered water pump systems in non-PRASA districts empower and guard communities against being completely cut-off from pumping clean water even if the island’s electric grid falters, comes hurricane, electricity shortage, or earthquake.

Rodriguez remarks: “We never doubted that water security could be achieved just because we were a small organization and we didn’t have the funds yet. We identified the problem, we went forth, and we built it. We did it.”