People scramble for water across Venezuela

Residents across Venezuela are scrambling to find water, digging wells and exploring tunnels to locate any source to tap, an essential shortfall brought into full focus amid the pervasive effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

For some living in one low-income Caracas neighbourhood, the situation is so dire that an abandoned construction site was seen as the end of suffering.

Workers had long ago stopped building a nearby highway tunnel through the mountain above them. Yet, spring water continued to pool inside the viaduct, then stream past their homes, wasted. The construction firm had also left behind coils of tube and other materials.

Neighbours rallied to salvage and build their own rustic waterline, tapping into the tunnel's vast lagoon and running the essential supply to their homes.

Today, they're free of the city's crumbling service and enjoy what many in Venezuelan consider a luxury.

Other residents in Caracas rely on bottles filled from the hose of a generous neighbour or government tanker trucks, but shallow, handmade wells have also become an improvised solution.

Residents in this nation of 30 million complain their public water lines in decline for decades continue failing.

A survey by the Venezuelan Observatory of Public Services, a non-profit organization, estimated that 86 per cent could have unreliable water service, including an 11 per cent that have none at all.

The same survey also says that in Venezualan largest cities, 65 per cent of the population does not have enough clean water for basic hygiene to fight the coronavirus under World Health Organization guidelines.

María Eugenia Gil, a clean water advocate and director of the Caracas-based non-profit Clear Water Foundation, said Venezuela has vast natural water resources but the nation's broken infrastructure fails to deliver it to people.

Access to clean water is a human right, she said.

The pandemic has brought this dire shortage into focus as the number of daily coronavirus illnesses grows in Venezuela.

Until Thursday about three dozen people have died of more than 4,000 people falling ill, according to official figures.

Gil said residents desperate for water have no choice but to break a nationwide quarantine and hunt for water and then stand in line waiting to fill their bottles. This exposes them to the virus or could spread it if people are already sick.

In a corner of a Caracas' shantytown called Petare, one of Latin America's largest, residents start gathering at dawn once a week waiting for a government water truck to fill large blue barrels.

Officials started to deliver water a month ago to fight the new coronavirus, but residents say they've lived nearly a year without running water.

Once their barrels are full, they then have to move the heavy lift of the week's supply into their homes.

Many carry a bucket at a time into their home, a time-consuming job that requires the labour of young and old.