MAKASSAR, Indonesia — For years, Rahma paid a monthly rate for water that never flowed to her home in eastern Indonesia’s largest urban area, here where the Tallo River meets the Pacific Ocean. “If I’m late by one day, I’ll be fined,” Rahma told Mongabay Indonesia near the coast of Makassar, the largest city on the island of Sulawesi. “They didn’t take away the meter, so we thought maybe the water would come back on, but it never did.” In the 15th century, the kingdom of Tallo transformed Makassar into a maritime power that dominated southern Sulawesi’s trading routes until eventual defeat by Dutch occupiers in the 1660s. Today, thousands who live on the modern seafront in the sweltering port of 1.5 million battle daily water scarcity, where access to this most basic of needs is already squeezed by crisis. In 2000, the regional government established a local water company to help supply water to parched households here in Tallo. But the local utility, known in Indonesia as a PDAM, is unreliable and the water often runs only at night, if at all, local customers in Makassar told Mongabay. Around three-quarters of those surveyed in Makassar for a report published last year by Indonesia’s largest environmental organization said they experienced difficulties in obtaining water. That means residents like Rahma and Sinar, 45, who is the ward of Tallo’s seventh neighborhood, have to resort to wearying daily treks across one of the hottest parts of Indonesia to queue at dawn for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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