Power and water outages have combined with record-breaking heat. Three Iranians tell us how they’ve had to adjust.
Tehran, Iran – Every morning at 6am, Sara reaches for her phone – not to check messages, but to see when the day’s blackout will begin.
The 44-year-old digital marketer in Tehran has memorised the weekly electricity schedule yet still checks her phone each morning for last-minute changes as she plans her life around the two-hour power cuts.
“Without electricity, there is no air conditioner to make the heat tolerable,” Sara says, describing how Iran’s convergent crises – water scarcity, power shortages and record-breaking temperatures – have fundamentally altered her daily routine.
The water service cuts are unannounced. They last hours at a time and truly unnerve Sara, so she scrambles to fill buckets whenever she can before the taps run dry.
