By Giff Johnson
For Variety

MAJURO — In the Marshall Islands, if you want to take a shower or wash your clothes or have drinking water you pray for rain. But for the past two months even praying hasn’t helped, as El Niño has interrupted the normal steady supply of rainfall, putting this central Pacific nation on a drought alert with the government cutting back fresh water service to the capital’s population of 30,000 to only two days each week.
Majuro depends for its fresh water almost entirely on rain, with a small amount of water pumped out from a series of fresh water lens wells at one end of the 30-mile long coral atoll.
But the 200,000 gallons per day that can be pumped from this lens well is just a fraction of the more than one million gallons of fresh water Majuro households consume each day water is available.
As the drought intensified this week, Majuro Water and Sewer Company workers set up reverse osmosis water making units in two locations that allow the public to fill up small containers of drinking water free of charge.
Water company head Terry Mellan said the company has also instituted a 1,000-gallon restriction on water deliveries by truck.
But with only two trucks to deliver water to Majuro residents, the company is already backlogged with hundreds of orders waiting delivery to water-starved customers who are surrounded on all sides by ocean salt water.
The company’s water reservoir was down to less than nine million gallons earlier this week — about a nine-day supply at present pumping levels. Mellan indicated the company is looking at the possibility of reducing water hours from the present two days per week to just once a week to further conserve water.
Normally Majuro gets about eight inches of rainfall in January, but last month fewer than two inches were recorded by the weather station, and only trace rainfall has been recorded in February.
Weather officials have predicted a “moderate” El Niño that is expected to affect the islands for several more months.
The last major drought occurred in 1998, when the Marshall Islands went for six months — from January to June — with virtually no rainfall. During that drought, the U.S. government declared the country a disaster area, and flew in millions of dollars worth of water making and water delivery equipment. Most of the water making equipment, however, is no longer usable because of damage from the harsh salt air environment of Majuro Atoll.
The El Niño weather phenomenon causes the Pacific Ocean temperatures to rise, changing wind and rain patterns in the region, sometimes drastically.
While El Niño can cause higher rainfall in the southwestern part of the United States and Peru, leading to destructive floods, on the opposite side of the Pacific, droughts hit western Pacific islands.