Only 136 of 335 municipalities in Venezuela receive water by pipeline at least once a week, most of them only for a few hours. Seventy-one spent over a month without the service, and at least 18 municipalities in the country have sectors whose households had a year or more without receiving even a drop.
Of all the country’s municipalities, only 17 reports having a normal water supply, only interrupted by the increasingly common blackouts affecting the country. In those zones people can follow one of the recommendations from the World Health Organization: wash their hands with water and soap, constantly.
The remaining 93 municipalities have water every 15 days or receive it only once a month.
The information gathered by El Pitazo’s team agrees with figures from the Venezuelan Public Services Observatory -Ovsp in Spanish-, which reported that only 16.7% of Venezuelans have continuous water services in their homes on the last four months of 2019.
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The OVSP also found that 65.9% of the inhabitants of 10 of the country’s main cities evaluate negatively the drinking water service they receive in their homes.
In this regard, Julio Cubas, Ovsp president, noted that since they began work on the organization in 2018, “potable water service has received the lowest evaluations by citizens and, according to the new results, it observed that this trend is maintained in similar ranges, with a percentage of negative assessment above 60%.”
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The count also shows that in at least 172 municipalities they use improvised water sources such as wells, rivers, underground deposits, springs, and even broken pipes on public roads to supply themselves and store the water needed for cooking, and to keep their homes minimally clean.
The Ovsp’s reports indicate that several zones in Caracas, the capital city, spent two weeks without water over pipes. That is why Venezuelan inhabitants have water tanks.
There is not a single state of the 23 in all Venezuela that has regular water service in all its municipalities, and the protests registered in the country are evidence.
In January 2020, the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict reported 175 protests for public services and determined that the demand for drinking water continues to be among the main causes of protests for services in different communities in the country.
You can read the full report in Spanish here.
