1Barely had the reservoirs dipped below a third of their capacity when ministers, long dismissive of the warnings, began invoking the spectre of rationing.
2The drought, now entering its third consecutive year, has laid bare decades of chronic underinvestment in the country's antiquated water infrastructure.
3That pipes leak away roughly a fifth of treated water daily is a statistic critics brandish with weary, well-earned exasperation.
4Water companies, privatised amid great fanfare some three decades ago, stand accused of privileging shareholder dividends over the unglamorous graft of maintenance.
5Their executives demur, of course, pointing to balance sheets which, they insist, reflect unprecedented sums channelled into ambitious modernisation programmes.
6Few outside the industry find such protestations convincing, least of all the farmers watching their reservoirs dwindle into cracked, ochre basins.
7The government's draft legislation, widely trailed as transformative, amounts in practice to little more than a reshuffling of existing regulatory powers.
8Environmental groups have greeted it with a scepticism bordering on contempt, one spokesman dismissing the bill as a masterclass in studied ambiguity.
9What renders the impasse particularly galling is that the technical solutions, from desalination to reservoir expansion, have been understood for years.
10Absent a politically painful reckoning over pricing and ownership, experts warn, each successive drought will be met with the same choreography of alarm and inertia.
11Whether this summer's hardship finally concentrates minds in the capital remains, like the long-range forecast itself, stubbornly and dispiritingly uncertain.