56% of Puerto Rico's Water Systems Have an Open Health Violation Right Now

We pulled the EPA's own violation records for every public water system in Puerto Rico and asked the same question we asked of every state: how many are breaking a health rule right now.

236 of Puerto Rico's 424 water systems — 55.7% — are under an open, unresolved, health-based violation. Nationally, the rate is 6.2% (3,853 of 62,166 systems). Puerto Rico's rate is nearly 9 times the national average, and it isn't close to second place:

The five worst rates in the country

Rank	State / territory	Systems w/ open violation	Total systems	Rate
1	Puerto Rico	236	424	55.7%
2	Connecticut	328	918	35.7%
3	New Mexico	191	678	28.2%
4	West Virginia	104	468	22.2%
5	Louisiana	206	1,032	20.0%

We ranked every state by raw violation count back in June — Puerto Rico placed 5th there, behind California and Texas. But those are the two biggest states in the country by system count; a raw count buries the real story. Rank by rate — the share of a place's own systems that are non-compliant right now — and Puerto Rico isn't in the top five. It's alone at the top, ahead of the next-worst state by 20 percentage points.

What's actually driving the number

Puerto Rico's public water supply isn't one utility. It's PRASA, the island-wide authority, plus hundreds of small, independently operated systems — acueductos rurales and acueductos comunales — each serving a single barrio or rural community off its own well or spring. Some of the systems carrying the most open violations right now: Caguas (16 open health-based violations), Utuado (11), Patillas (11), Adjuntas (10), Villalba (9), and Ponce (9).

This matches the pattern we found nationally: small systems break health rules and stay broken far more often than big-city utilities. Puerto Rico just has an unusual concentration of them — hundreds of small, separately governed systems on one island, each responsible for its own compliance, monitoring, and treatment upgrades.

It's also recent. Of the open violations with a recorded start date, the overwhelming majority began in the last year — not a decades-old backlog quietly carried forward. This is the live, current list.

What "open" and "health-based" mean

Same definitions we use everywhere on this site. Health-based means the violation is tied to a standard the EPA set to protect health — a contaminant over its legal limit, or a treatment/monitoring step tied to one — not a paperwork or reporting rule. Open means the record is still flagged Unaddressed or Addressed; resolved and archived violations aren't counted. Full methodology in the national violations piece.

None of this covers microplastics, either. Every violation counted above is tied to a contaminant the EPA already regulates — bacteria, lead, disinfection byproducts, a missed monitoring step. Microplastics aren't regulated yet, so no system on the island, not even one with a clean record, is required to test for them or report what it finds. A spotless violation history and a tap full of plastic particles are not the same question. The only way to answer the second one is to test the water directly — a microplastics test kit does that in about 15 minutes.

See the systems yourself

Every one of Puerto Rico's public water systems — PRASA and every rural aqueduct — is on the map, with whatever EPA data exists for it: violations, lead and copper results, contaminant readings. Browse Puerto Rico's systems here, or look up a few of the small rural aqueducts directly:

• Acueducto Rural de Tejas
• Acueducto Rural Guacio
• Acueducto Comunal Pozo Azul

A violation doesn't automatically mean the water is unsafe to drink the day you read this — some are monitoring failures, where a system missed a required test and the EPA treats the gap itself as a health risk because nobody can say what was in the water. But an open health-based violation means a rule built to protect people was broken, and as of the EPA's latest records, it still hasn't been fixed. For more than half of Puerto Rico's water systems, that's the current state of things.