Myanmar faces water shortages caused by power cuts

View of Yangon, the economic capital of Burma.

Photo: Ralf-André Lettau, source: Wikipedia

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

A degraded security situation since the military coup of February 2021, the Covid-19 epidemic and then inflation, the Burmese are now affected by daily power cuts and even water shortages in certain districts of the economic capital Yangon.

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For several days, long queues have been forming in the streets of certain districts of Yangon.

Under overwhelming heat, temperatures regularly exceed 38 degrees, dozens of residents wait in front of a tanker truck to fill buckets and cans.

The volunteers in charge of distributing the water denounce a situation much worse than usual.

Due to an aging grid and demand that regularly outstrips supply during the summer months, power outages are common in Myanmar.

But their frequency, sometimes for more than eight hours, prevents pumping stations from operating normally and leads to water shortages.

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Dark hour for Burma

In recent days, power outages have regularly plunged the population into darkness.

In protest, tens of thousands of civil servants stopped work, leaving schools, hospitals and administrations empty.

The junta has announced major disruptions in the electricity supply until the end of the week, but rejects any responsibility for these malfunctions.

For the military regime, this increasingly chaotic situation is the consequence of the rise in the price of gas due to the war in Ukraine and the

attacks carried out by opponents against the country's infrastructure.

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  • Burma

  • Energies

  • Ukraine