Reservoir Draw Slows in Jakarta as Rationing Holds

JAKARTA — The reservoirs that feed this megacity of tens of millions stopped falling this week, the first steady reading since late summer, though officials warned the reprieve is administrative, not meteorological. The Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly logged the city's combined storage at 41 percent of capacity, unchanged across seven days, after a month of household allocations capped at 90 liters a day per person. "We did not find new water; we asked people to make old water last," said district water engineer Sari Wibowo, who oversees a northern intake serving 300,000 residents. Wibowo's crews have spent the season chasing leaks in a distribution grid older than the drought regime it now serves. The Assembly cautions that a plateau at 41 percent leaves little margin before the dry-season peak, and that the global mean anomaly holding at +2.8 degrees keeps evaporation losses high. For a household in Wibowo's district, the arithmetic is simpler: the tap runs, for now, and the meter counts every liter.