“Stubborn Brazil Water Crisis Pushes Sabesp to Fix Infrastructure-Sao Paulo’s water crisis isn’t over yet”, 16 June 2015

After drought pushed Sao Paulo to the verge of severe water rationing, late summer rains gave the state-run utility Sabesp, Brazil’s biggest water provider, a second chance to fix infrastructure that city officials blamed for the crisis…The time squeeze highlights the precarious situation that South America’s largest metropolis is in after two decades without any major new water projects…“Infrastructure wasn’t Sabesp’s priority in recent years - - it didn’t take steps to avoid the crisis,” said Pedro Caetano Mancuso, director at the Center for Water Safety at the University of Sao Paulo…Sabesp has said it was the severity of last year’s drought and not a lack of infrastructure investments at Latin America’s largest publicly traded water utility that led to the crisis…Sao Paulo’s City Council in a June 10 report blamed Sabesp for the crisis…calling the…shortage “predictable.”“If Sabesp had invested the dividends it paid to shareholders in New York in projects to modernize systems and to maintain networks, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” said Laercio Benko, the council member who led the commission to investigate the shortage…In the company’s worst-case scenario, water could be shut off to most of the Sao Paulo metropolitan area five days a week…