Hundreds of families in Daraa camp, in southern Syria, have spent months buying drinking water by the tanker load, after mains supply to several neighbourhoods was cut for long stretches at a time.
Water does not reach the camp’s neighbourhoods on any regular schedule. Each household covers the shortfall at its own expense, in a cycle that repeats with every outage: order a tanker, pump the water into a rooftop or yard tank, then wait for the next delivery.
Summer widens the gap
Daily consumption climbs in the summer heat, as households need more water for drinking and domestic use at precisely the time the network is delivering least. The longer an outage runs, the more families rely on purchased water — turning the tanker from a fallback into the primary source.
Health concerns
Residents also voice health concerns, after months of drawing drinking and household water from sources outside the public network.
Water service falls under the energy ministry’s remit, and it is there that residents are directing their complaints. On the ground, however, nothing has shifted: neighbourhoods still go without for long periods, tankers still fill the gap, and the cost recurs with every purchase.
For readers outside the region, the detail that matters is the duration. This is not a single interruption during a heatwave but a months-long shortfall that has quietly reorganised household budgets and daily routines around water that arrives on a truck.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
