Opinion | My City Has Run Out of Fresh Water. Will Your City Be Next?

The Santa Lucía River, which provided a steady flow of fresh water to the capital for more than 150 years, has almost disappeared for some stretches. In February, a reservoir that until recently contained up to five billion gallons of water was sucked nearly dry. Another dwindled, at one point, to just 2 percent of capacity. As the sweet waters from Santa Lucía have emptied, the salty water from the Río de la Plata, an Atlantic Ocean estuary, has intruded into its riverbed. Our main water purification plant doesn’t have the technology to remove the salt, so it enters our pipes, our homes, our bodies.

The government has no plan B for this crisis, which could last until October. One senator has tweeted to pray for rain.

As bad as it is here, Montevideo’s water crisis is not unique. In 2018, Cape Town started making plans for the chaos that would ensue in the very real scenario that it could run out of water entirely. In Brazil, which owns a significant fraction of the world’s fresh water, numerous cities have restricted its use. In Mexico City, 70 percent of the population has access to water for only 12 hours a day, according to a 2017 United Nations study.

The 2023 U.N. World Water Development Report shows that one in four people lacks access to clean water. “We cannot claim surprise at the next drought,” Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights and drinking water, told me. “No matter how strong and long it may be,” he said, “there must be alternative, complementary, supplementary sources,” and there must be a plan to “establish priorities during the emergency.”

Last week, Mr. Arrojo-Agudo, in a statement with other experts, told Uruguay it “must put human consumption at the forefront, as indicated by international human rights standards,” ranking the demand “with an ethical priority.” The government took issue with his statement, saying the chemical levels were not as alarming as he claimed and that helpful measures were underway. But the rapporteur knows the problem all over the world is about the same and that rationing people’s consumption while leaving industrial or agricultural use unchecked will, as he told me, “wear down more water and generate a greater risk of contamination.”