Dry Taps, empty lakes, shuttered cities: A water crisis batters Iran

Boston Globe

26-07-2025

The government announced this past week that many reservoirs, particularly those that supply the capital, Tehran, with drinking water, were drying out. Water supplies for Tehran are predicted to run out in just a few weeks, officials said, pleading with the public to reduce water consumption.
'The water crisis is more serious than what is being talked about today, and if we do not make urgent decisions today, we will face a situation in the future that cannot be cured,' President Masoud Pezeshkian said at a Cabinet meeting Monday, adding, 'We cannot continue this way.'
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Already prone to droughts, Iran has exacerbated the problem with poor water management policies, which Pezeshkian acknowledged Monday. Climate change, too, has played a role; the country has weathered five consecutive years of drought.
Now, the crisis has grown so extreme that the government shut down all government offices and services in Tehran and more than two dozen other cities across the country Wednesday, creating a three-day weekend in an attempt to lower water and electricity usage. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a government spokesperson, said cities could have similar closures once or twice a week going forward, and suggested people 'go on holiday.'
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The Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Co. announced this past week that it had reduced water pressure to such low levels that in Tehran -- a city of 10 million people, many living and working in high-rise buildings -- water could not flow above the second floor of apartment buildings.
Some residents in Tehran said in interviews that water trickled from their faucets, making it difficult to flush the toilet or wash dishes and clothes. In some neighborhoods, water service was disrupted for 48 hours, residents said.
Many people and buildings are scrambling to buy water tanks, hoping to stockpile what little water there is to make it through future disruptions. The manager of one high-rise in the upscale neighborhood of Elahiyeh said the building was in its third day without water service.
When that building finally secured a water tank, the supply lasted for just two hours. It then procured water from a freelance water truck, the manager said, only to realize it was polluted seawater, not suitable for drinking or bathing.
Across town, Nafiseh, a schoolteacher, questioned the water storage strategy. 'My mom has filled half the kitchen with bottles of water, big and small, but I think it's a mistake. In a real crisis, a few containers won't save us,' said Nafiseh, 36, who like all Iranians interviewed for this article asked her last name not be published out of fear of retribution.
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The water shortage comes on top of scheduled daily power cuts across the country. Since December, Iran, which has one of the biggest supplies of natural gas and crude oil in the world, has struggled with a full-blown energy crisis, forcing schools, universities and government offices to close or reduce their hours and power to be rationed at industrial factories.
The cumulative effect of crises on top of crises -- from war, to daily explosions suspected to be sabotage, to skyrocketing inflation, to water and power cuts -- has many Iranians reeling. In interviews and social media posts, they say that it feels as if their country is in free fall, and question the government's ability to reverse the situation.
'Addressing just one aspect of the crisis is futile; both electricity and water governance must be reformed,' Hamidreza Khodabakhshi, the head of the union for water engineers in the province of Khuzestan in southern Iran, said in a telephone interview. 'Repeated calls for public conservation -- without action from authorities -- shift blame unfairly to citizens.'
Environmental experts say that the water crisis stems from decades of mismanaging water resources and other misguided policies, including the overdevelopment of urban areas, draining of groundwater for farming and excessive construction of dams. Iran has also piped water to the central desert regions to feed water-intensive industries, such as steelmaking, owned by the government.
Climate change is also exacerbating the crisis. The Ministry of Energy says that annual rainfall over the past five years has declined from about 11 inches to below 6, creating the worst drought in 50 years. Mohammad Sadegh Motamedian, the governor of Tehran province, told local news media that at four dams supplying drinking water to the capital, water reserves had dropped to about 14% of their capacity.
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Lush wetlands have crusted into beds of sand and dust storms, and wells have gone dry. Crops and livestock are dying. Parts of the country are sinking at alarming rates after water aquifers have been sucked up -- in Tehran, parts of the city are sinking over 12 inches a year, officials said. Lakes and water reservoirs where boating, fishing and swimming were once summer staples have dried or shrunk.
'I remember swimming in these places when I was little, and it was full. Now they are all dry and empty, and we can walk through them from one side to the other,' said Saeed, a 37-year-old owner of a technology firm in Tehran.
Negin, a 28-year-old mother of two, lives in the southern city of Bushehr, where temperatures average above 120 degrees in the summer and humidity weighs heavy in the air. Recently, running water has been available for only a few hours a day in her neighborhood, she said in an interview.
Running the air conditioning has been difficult and often impossible because of daily power cuts, she said, leaving her home feeling like a sauna and her angry at the government.
'How are we supposed to live like this?' she asked. 'What are we supposed to use to clean our kids? To wash clothes?'
Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, said that a decade ago, when he served as deputy head of Iran's Department of Environment, the water shortages were mild and confined to remote areas. Now, he said, with Tehran and other major cities at risk of running dry, the situation can best be likened to a bankruptcy, but what is in a fast, apparently irreversible decline is not cash but water.
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'Responses are chaotic, urgent, confused and reactive,' Madani said in an interview. 'What worries me most is the inequity. Wealthier urban residents can afford water storage, tanker deliveries or other solutions, while the poor will bear the brunt of the suffering.'
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