In the last few years, utility services in Venezuela have been approached with the same dexterity and precision a squirrel can handle brain surgery.
If you have followed Venezuelan economy in the last decade and a half, you know it has broken all hyperinflation records. Similar “experts” have handled the water, electricity, and phone companies. That explains everything.
In some areas of Venezuela it has become customary to spend most of every week without either service; sometimes without all of them. We live downtown Cumaná and, except for the eternal sewage problems, we had not been hit so hard by interruptions of utility services. That until now. For four days now, water service was interrupted once more. There is a problem at the Santiago Mariño dam, better known as Turimiquire, which is a few hundred kilometers south-west of Cumaná and provides water for the states of Sucre, Anzoategui, and Nueva Esparta (mostly from the Neveri River).
The problems with this vital structure have been discussed with the same opacity that has characterized Venezuelan governments in the last decades. Nobody know for sure what the problems are, how serious they are, and/or why they have not been solved after so many “repair” announcements.
Ironically, it has been raining up in the mountains around our river head. If the problems are not solved people will start carrying water from the river itself, never mind it is muddy water.
We had a little bit of rain two days ago and was barely enough to collect some water for urgent bathroom use.
Some rumors point at negligence in the maintenance of the dam that has led to cracks big enough to put the whole structure at risks; others say it has to do with the accumulation of environmental problems (some of them caused by the same people who live around the dam).
In the meantime, people are suffering the consequences of the poor managing of the vital services. After four days, and out of desperation, some neighbors started to dig hole on the road and get water directly from the main pipes, which still carry a little.
There are already protests in different parts of the city because on some areas the water service had been already interrupted way before the formal announcement for this present contingency.
We'll see what happens tomorrow if we don't get the service restored tonight. I applaud people's resourcefulness and creativity to come up with solutions to urgent problems. Unfortunately, this kinds of solutions only tell politicians that people will manage, regardless of their corruption and mediocrity; which they read as "we don't really need to solve the big problem." Year after year budgets will come and go and the urgent matters will not be addressed for as long as people keep making do with what they got without demanding more transparency, efficiency, and improvements in their living conditions and governance.