The Puerto Rico Water Crisis: How to Help

In early June, San Juan went viral. Tourists posted empty shelves, hotels with no water in the taps, restaurants closing mid-shift. The National Guard got activated. News crews showed up. For a few days, the world was shocked that a US territory could run dry.

Here's what most of that coverage missed: this is Tuesday for a huge share of Puerto Rico. Between 2023 and nearly 2025, communities in the campo — rural Puerto Rico, away from the cameras — had running water on a five-hour window, 2pm to 7pm, if they were lucky. Some days, nothing at all. Roughly 59% of all treated water on the island is lost before it ever reaches a home, swallowed by pipes that are 50 to 80 years old, some dating back to the 1950s. San Juan's Municipal Office for Emergency Management logged over 3,000 water-emergency cases in the first two weeks of June alone. The crisis wasn't new. It just finally had tourists in the frame.

Who actually gets left behind

Puerto Rico has one of the most aged populations in the United States. When the water goes out for days, it's disproportionately elderly residents who are hospitalized — not because the water shortage is abstract to them, but because they often don't have a car to go find water, a phone with the right app to report an outage, or family nearby to check in. A crisis that's an inconvenience for someone with a car and a smartphone is genuinely dangerous for someone without either. That gap — between who can route around a broken system and who can't — is where most of the real harm happens, and it's almost entirely invisible from a hotel balcony in San Juan.

Where EXC International actually is

This is why EXC International doesn't operate out of press conferences. They're on the ground in Patillas, in the campo, doing two things at once: buying water and supplies directly for elderly and underserved families who have no other support right now, and building potable rainwater harvesting systems as the actual long-term fix — water independence that doesn't depend on a 26-year-old Superaqueduct or a government agency's next emergency budget approval. You can see some of that work directly here: EXC International on Instagram.

Why this is part of what we do

A portion of every sale at Hacienda Wilde goes toward funding this work. That's not a marketing line — it's the actual structure of the business. When you set up a filtration or ionization system through us, part of what you're doing, whether you think about it this way or not, is helping fund water access for people who have none. Health being the foundation everything else stands on isn't just true for the person filling their glass in their own kitchen. It's the same idea at a larger scale: a community that has reliable water is a community that can actually build everything else on top of it.

What you can do

If you're thinking about a system for your own home, reach out and we'll set it up together — you're funding this work at the same time. And if you just want to help directly, right now, without buying anything, you can donate at excinternational.org. Either one moves real resources to people who are, at this moment, waiting for someone to check on them.