Puerto Rico rations water — rainwater capture could fix it

Puerto Rico is rationing water right now. The island gets plenty of rain — enough to harvest billions of gallons a year — but it isn't collecting it. A simple system of catchment surfaces and storage tanks would change that.

The math is straightforward. More rain falls on the island than the current infrastructure can use, and the cost of building rainwater systems is a fraction of what it costs to truck water or build desalination plants. The technology is old and proven: gutters, first-flush diverters, cisterns, pumps. No Silicon Valley nonsense.

The real barrier isn't engineering. It's policy. Puerto Rico's water authority has struggled for years with aging pipes, power outages, and a budget that doesn't match the scale of the problem. Rainwater capture at the neighborhood level — schools, churches, homes — would take pressure off the grid and give families something the central system can't always deliver.

Why this matters for us:
When the grid fails and the taps run dry, the people who have rain barrels on their roofs are the ones who still have water — and that's the kind of resilience every Brown and Black community needs to build for itself.