🏜️ Fewer droughts, but worse ones

Barra do Piraí, a modest town in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state, hosts a piece of infrastructure that almost no one outside the water sector can name and almost everyone in Greater Rio depends on.

The Santa Cecília pumping station draws 119 m³/s out of the Paraíba do Sul River — the volume the national water agency regulates as a daily minimum, against an installed capacity of 160 m³/s across four pumps — and lifts it some fifteen meters into the Piraí, reversing that river's flow. A second pumping stage at Vigário carries the water the rest of the way into the Guandu basin, where it supplies roughly 11.4 million people in Rio's metropolitan area…

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