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Mary Stuart Weitzman pbUhWxjaTQ

CARACAS, Venezuela – Reaching for the faucet felt like a frustrating game of chance for Elizabeth Robles.

At first, water flowed only one or two days a week, so Robles, president of her homeowners' association, hired trucks to fill the building's underground storage tank. With self-imposed rationing, the residents had water — but only for an hour, three times each day.

"When you get home at five in the afternoon all sweaty, you couldn't take a shower," said Robles, a small business owner and lawyer. "It's like punishment by water."

Finally they were fed up. Since the government couldn't provide water, they decided to drill their own well alongside their apartment building in the tony Campo Alegre neighborhood, an increasingly popular solution among the well-to-do as Venezuela's water system crumbles along with its socialist-run economy.

Venezuela's meltdown has been accelerating under President Nicolas Maduro's rule, prompting masses of people to abandon the nation in frustration at shortages of food and medicine, street violence, rampant blackouts — and now sputtering faucets.

Robles said she and her neighbors hired a drilling firm in February for $7,000 — roughly $280 per family. At least three other buildings on their tree-lined street, which is near the city's most-exclusive country club, have hired the same engineer.

The firm moves its crew and towering yellow rig from one work site to the next. The noisy diesel-powered machine clatters around the clock for several days until the drill strikes water, generally about 260 feet (80 meters) down.

Meanwhile, the less fortunate struggle with dwindling public water supplies, hoping sporadic flows will fill their 150-gallon (560-liter) plastic storage tanks fitted with buzzing electric pumps. Or they stand in line at trickling hillside springs to fill up empty jugs for free.

"Sometimes your dirty clothes pile up," said Carlos Garcia, an unemployed construction worker who used up eight hours one day filling containers at a spring.

Neighborhood water shortages have sparked more than 400 protests countrywide in the first five months of the year, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict.

Caracas once had a world-class water system, pumping water from far-off reservoirs over towering mountains into the valley that cradles the city. Now its pipes are bursting, pumps are failing and a small herd of cattle grazes at the bottom of the Mariposa reservoir outside the city, feeding on grass that should be deep underwater.