In the Los Alcarrizos district of the Dominican Republic, hundreds of families across five residential sectors have spent months grappling with two crippling basic service failures: prolonged, routine power outages and a persistent shortage of potable drinking water, local residents publicly denounced this Sunday.
The affected communities — Las Glorias, Los Cerros, Residencial Pablo, Mella and Pueblo Nuevo — report that power cuts follow a predictable, disruptive schedule, cutting off electricity consistently from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. each night. This nightly blackout window does more than just disrupt daily life: it undermines rest for working residents and inflicts measurable financial harm on local small business operators who rely on consistent power to keep their businesses running.
Gustavo Pérez, who owns a small neighborhood grocery store, explained that the combination of extended outages and the region’s sweltering high temperatures has destroyed hundreds of dollars worth of inventory that requires constant refrigeration. “Our products that need refrigeration are spoiling due to the lack of energy,” Pérez confirmed in an interview with local community organizers.
North Villa Mella, the broader region where these sectors are located, has long been framed as being on the cusp of modern development, yet decades of underinvestment have left it trapped in systemic poverty with gaps in even the most basic public services. The water crisis compounds the misery caused by unreliable power, with residents of Las Glorias reporting that consistent drinking water service has been unavailable for more than seven months.
Supply gaps are most extreme in the elevated sections of the sector, where running water rarely reaches households at all. Even in lower-elevation neighborhoods, water is only available for a few hours just once or twice a week. Forced to secure water for their households amid the chronic shortage, many families have turned to purchasing water from private tanker trucks — a service that costs between 2,000 and 2,500 Dominican pesos, an expense that local residents say places an unbearable strain on already tight household budgets.
Residents describe daily life in the area as unlivable: backup power inverters have been worn down by constant use from intermittent power, soaring heat makes indoor spaces unbearable, and booming mosquito populations have made it impossible to get a full night of sleep. “The inverters are down, the heat is unbearable, and the mosquitoes have us cornered. We can’t sleep,” community members said in a joint statement.
Mercedes Cruz, a long-time resident of the area, shared that she returns home from a full workday at 10 p.m. each night only to face another round of service failures. “Every day I get home at 10 pm, after a long day at work, and I find there’s no electricity. Between the blackouts, the lack of water, the mosquitoes, and the heat, I feel like I never get any rest,” Cruz explained.
Local community leaders have issued an urgent call for national and municipal authorities to intervene immediately to resolve the crisis and restore stable, reliable water and power service to the affected neighborhoods. Fed up with unfulfilled political pledges, leaders say residents are demanding tangible solutions that respect their fundamental right to access these core public services. “We demand respect for our right to receive electricity and drinking water. We are tired of promises and we need solutions,” leaders concluded.