Bogota lifts water rations despite persistent shortages

The mayor of Colombia’s capital Bogota said Friday that his government would end the water rations that were put in place to raise water levels in the city’s main reservoir a year ago.

In a speech, Mayor Carlos Fernando Galan said that the restrictions on water consumption would be lifted on Saturday morning.

After a year, and thanks to the commitment of the entire city, the most serious water crisis in the history of Bogota is over. As of Saturday, rationing will be lifted permanently.

Mayor Carlos Fernando Galan

According to Bogota’s water supply chief, Natasha Avendaño, the rationing allowed the water level in the Chingaza reservoir to rise to 40% of its capacity.

Severe drought that lasted from 2023 and 2024 had lowered this level to 16% and threatened to leave Bogota without water a year ago.

Bogota authorities ignored experts, who recommended to maintain the emergency measures until Chingaza’s water level reached 70% or 80%, according to newspaper El Espectador.

Local authorities hoped that the rationing would help reduce water consumption from 17.7m3 to 15m3 per second, but this apparently failed.

According to Avendaño, water consumption dropped to 16.2m3 per second during the rationing period.

The disappointing result is due because Bogota residents were already consuming water responsibly, Civil and Environmental engineering professor Juan Guillermo Saldarriaga told El Espectador.

At the end of the 1990s, Bogota went through another very important emergency in the Chingaza system. On that occasion, due to landslides in the tunnels that bring water from the Chingaza páramo to La Plata. At that time the city experienced more severe rationing, but the educational campaigns carried out by the Mayor’s Office of Antanas Mockus helped the people of Bogota to learn how to make better use of water.

Juan Guillermo Saldarriaga

Both the mayor and his water supply chief urged Bogota’s more than 10 million residents “not to lose the good consumption habits.”