A Colombian Water Crisis (or '6 days into My New Role and this happens!'), with Dr. Natasha Avendaño, CEO Acueducto/EAAB, Bogota, Colombia

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, a 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Natasha. Chief executive of Acueducto in Bogota, Columbia.
[00:00:19] Natasha Avendaño: Thank you very much Piers for this invitation.
[00:00:21] Piers Clark: It's wonderful to have you with us because you have a truly fascinating story to tell about the nightmare scenario that anyone stepping into the leader of a utility would never want to happen for them, it happened to you.
[00:00:34] Piers Clark: But before we do, let's learn a little bit about you and about the organization. So Natasha, can you tell me what you did to get into the role that you are in now?
[00:00:46] Natasha Avendaño: I am an economist. I have three master's degree, a PhD, and I've always worked in the public sector. Six years ago I got into the utility sector. I was the superintendent of public utilities, which is the national organization or entity that overview and supervises all the public utilities, energy, water, sewerage, gas, everything.
[00:01:12] Natasha Avendaño: And from that position, I went through the energy regulator and that's why I got into the utilities board and ended up being appointed by Bogota's mayor last January to be the CEO of the biggest company in Columbia that manages and provides the water and sewerage services for over 10 million Colombians.
[00:01:35] Piers Clark: Excellent. So, what we've got is Acueducto serves 10 million people it's water and wastewater, around the city of Bogota. And you do retail it's direct to the customers. It's not to any local water providers?
[00:01:48] Natasha Avendaño: Exactly. So our direct customers are around 10 million people. We serve both potable water and waste water services . We also sell bulk water to some other providers in the region. We have 11 bulk water contracts with these other small utilities in the municipalities nearby Bogota. Adding up the additional utilities that buy bulk water from us it probably adds up to 11.5 million people that is serviced by our water.
[00:02:22] Piers Clark: Excellent. And it's good that you do wastewater, but we are going to be talking about drinking water today because as you said, you joined Acueducto in January 2024, and within literally days of being there, circumstances turned against you.
[00:02:37] Piers Clark: Can you tell that story please?
[00:02:39] Natasha Avendaño: When I got to this position, I knew that this was gonna be a challenge, but it was gonna be an easy challenge, because my previous job of supervising all the utilities, so I had sort of confidence and the company is big, it has 137 years of history. Everything was perfect.
[00:02:59] Natasha Avendaño: To just put you in context, Bogota has three main systems for provision of the water. Everything is from running water. We don't have underground water for our production of portable water. We have our main reservoir up in the mountains of 220 cubic hectometers capacity. Another one that is closer to the city but is connected to our main treatment plan is 70 cubic hecter capacity. So we had a robust system but has one flow. We have the rain that fills up the system and in the same year we use up that water. We haven't had any trouble in the previous 60 years.
[00:03:41] Natasha Avendaño: However, I started having alerts from the team that manages the water catchments saying, we are experiencing low levels of our main reservoir system.
[00:03:52] Piers Clark: So you are in a situation where you've got some robust assets, you've got some decent sized reservoirs positioned strategically around the city but it all hinges on the rains mustn't fail, the weather mustn't leave you high and dry quite literally. And of course, during late 2023, you didn't get the weather you required, which meant that you were now at historically low levels inside your reservoirs.
[00:04:16] Piers Clark: I do think it's important to understand just how new you were in the role when this flagged up and your engineers were telling you Natasha, we're at record low levels, how long had you been in the post?
[00:04:28] Natasha Avendaño: Six days. They've been flagging it up before. The previous administration knew. Maybe it would've be better to have at least a more profound conversation when we were doing the transition.
[00:04:43] Natasha Avendaño: So going back to the three main systems that we have, the second one is the Bogota River. This is a system that became very important in the management of the crisis. The Bogota River used to provide 24% of the portable water. The other 70% was coming from Chingaza. Part of the strategy that they already had designed was we're gonna increase the amount of water that we're bringing from the Bogota River system progressively to help lower the pressure over the Chingaza system, mostly because January, February, and March are the driest months of the rainy season.
[00:05:25] Piers Clark: Okay. So what you've got is you've got 70% coming from the reservoirs, which are at historically low levels. You've got 24% that normally comes from the river.
[00:05:33] Piers Clark: And the strategy is, well, you know what, Natasha, it's not gonna last forever. We just need to get through these next few months. So let's draw a bit more from the river. That's what the engineers were telling you. We'll be all right. We'll just get through these next few weeks.
[00:05:46] Natasha Avendaño: Yeah, basically because our Hydro Meteorology Institute, the institute at the national level that forecast the weather from the beginning of last year was saying, yeah, we didn't have rains the way we were supposed to have by the end of 2023 because of El Niño phenomena. But this is gonna end soon, and we're gonna get the rain and it didn't.
[00:06:10] Piers Clark: Not only did you have a dry, dry season, you had a wiped out wet season. You have reservoirs that will only cope with one year's worth of water. Therefore, if they don't get topped up, you're left high and dry. Now, I want to get to the bit of what you did, 'cause the engagement with customers and the restrictions you put in place are incredible. So what were the restrictions and when did you put them in place?
[00:06:30] Natasha Avendaño: Mid January we started to do savings campaigns with the customers, calling the customers to be conscious that we needed to have a responsible water consumption. We had by the end of January, massive fires in the mountains that we have right here in the city. So it was also a problem because we needed the water to extinguish the fires but then the rain didn't come. So we start doing management pressure in the system to try to save more water that way.
[00:07:00] Natasha Avendaño: But by the end of March, the rain didn't come. We were literally running out of water and we couldn't let the reservoir to dry. So we divided the whole city in nine zones we would restrict the service for 24 hours. At 8:00 AM in the morning, we would cut off the service and start the reestablishment of the service the following day by 6:00 AM in the morning.
[00:07:25] Piers Clark: You've got a whole bunch of challenges there because not only are you restricting parts of the network, you've then gotta flush those bits of the network before you can issue water. But you now have this rolling campaign of people having water depending on which zone they were in.
[00:07:40] Piers Clark: How much were the restrictions? Was it one day a week that they were restricted or more?
[00:07:45] Natasha Avendaño: Every 10 days, because we divided the whole area of service in nine zones. So you would repeat your restriction at the 10 day.
[00:07:55] Piers Clark: My suspicion of human nature is that if someone told me that I was gonna be restricted with water on Tuesday, I'm going to fill my bath on Monday, I'm going to, I'm going to store all of as much water as I possibly can just in case I need it. Did you see any of that sort of behavior?
[00:08:11] Natasha Avendaño: We knew that was gonna be probably at the beginning while you get used to how much water you really and actually need. We didn't see it that much because we also had a huge campaign of trying to make people conscious of you don't need to have a lot of water saved. If it's a working day, you are not gonna be in your house and the other half you're probably gonna be sleeping. It's not that you need to save a lot of water. And if you do, well, don't waste it afterwards.
[00:08:41] Piers Clark: Now, when did you put in place the restrictions? And more importantly, when did they cease?
[00:08:47] Natasha Avendaño: We started the restrictions officially the 11th of April of 2024. That was the first day we had one ninth of our area of service without water for 24 hours. And it wasn't 24 hours, of course it was more, because water has to run down the pipes. And we had a lot of people complaining saying that we were telling lies. That was probably one of the most challenging part of the communication is it has to be slow because otherwise we were gonna have problems with the distribution network.
[00:09:19] Piers Clark: I can imagine this nightmare scenario. So you started it in the middle of April 2024, expecting it to last for just a few weeks. When did you lift these restrictions?
[00:09:30] Natasha Avendaño: We lifted the restrictions exactly one year, 12th of April of 2025. We were not expecting to last few weeks because we always said that the reason for the restriction is we needed to guarantee we had enough water for 2024, and enough water for 2025 because we needed the hydrological cycle to get normal again.
[00:09:50] Natasha Avendaño: And that's why in April, which is when normally the hydrological cycle starts, we start seeing a totally different scenario, that's when we decided to go back to normal and stop having the restrictions apply.
[00:10:03] Piers Clark: Excellent. I think there's a separate podcast on what you've done now to give yourself resilience for the future, but we don't have time to cover it here.
[00:10:10] Piers Clark: The one last question I'd like to ask is, how's the relationship you've got with your customers? Have they come on a journey with you, or are they resentful and angry?
[00:10:19] Natasha Avendaño: I think most of our customers understood and really got engaged into the need of helping us save water.
[00:10:28] Natasha Avendaño: And just one thing that for me is important to notice is more than two months after we lifted the restrictions, we're still seeing a consumption that is below what we were expecting it to be. So we didn't have that like jump that we thought it was gonna have. No, they kept the good habits.
[00:10:46] Piers Clark: Excellent. When you do a water restriction or a hose pipe ban for a few weeks, people flip back to their old behaviors very quickly. When you do it for a full four seasons, full 12 months then it's a much more lasting change.
[00:11:00] Piers Clark: Natasha, that is a wonderful story. I do find myself thinking, well, if I'd been six days into a post and was presented with that problem. I probably would've thrown my hat into the ring and said, this wasn't what you promised. You have been spectacular in rising to that challenge and preserving the city of Bogota.
[00:11:17] Piers Clark: Now I want to finish with a slightly cheeky question, when you think back to the things you've done, what is it that you owe your parents?
[00:11:26] Natasha Avendaño: My parents both are engineers, civil engineers. So one thing that I owed them for this particular stage in my life is all the knowledge that I got empirically from them because they involved me in all their jobs and work while I was growing. I'm only child, so I had all the attention all the time.
[00:11:46] Natasha Avendaño: And the second one which is probably the more thoughtful is the perseverance and the capacity of being able to work in the things you face in a manner that make them happen and make them matter.
[00:12:00] Piers Clark: Brilliant. You have been listening to the Executive Exchange with me Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Dr. Natasha Avendaño, Chief executive of Acueducto in Bogota, Columbia. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you very much.