Tethys Rations a Megacity's Taps as Reservoirs Slip

JAKARTA — The Tethys Hydrous Group began rolling pressure cuts across three of this megacity's districts on Tuesday, a quiet rationing the utility calls "load-shaping" and residents call thirst by another name. Reservoir levels feeding the desalination intake have slipped through the hot months, and Tethys says its plants are running near capacity to hold the shortfall. "We are moving water, not making rain," a utility engineer, Sari Wibowo, said at a district pumping station, where the queue for the standpipe now forms before dawn. The Global Concordat Council's emergency water session, opened last month under Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen, is still weighing an allocation framework; until it reports, cities improvise. Hearth Relief International notes that registered climate migrants — past 112 million and climbing through the hot months — cluster hardest in the same water-stressed corridors Tethys serves. For Wibowo, the arithmetic is smaller and harder: forty liters a household, and a line that starts earlier each day.