12 photos show the extreme drought wrecking havoc in Chennai, India, where one of the biggest cities is almost out of water

• Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, is suffering from an acute water storage after a historic drought. Many of the region’s reservoirs are almost completely dry.
• Residents have been forced to line up for hours for tanked-in water or have attempted to collect water from holes dug in lake beds.
• Satellite images and photos on the ground have captured what it’s like living through the drought and its effect on the city’s water supplies.
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Residents of Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India are running out of water.

Since 2017, due to low rainfall and a failed monsoon season, nearly all of Chennai’s four major water bodies are drying up, India Today reported.

The crisis means that the majority of Chennai has depended heavily on water trucked in by the government.

These photos show the effects of the drought from the sky and on the ground for the over 6 million people who live in the area.

Chennai is in crisis after its four main water reservoirs ran completely dry. Drought has been an issue in the area for years, but conditions have gotten dire in the last few months.

Source: BBC

On June 14, the Puzhal reservoir on Chennai's outskirts dried out. This tower measures the amount of water in the reservoir.

Source: CNN

In 2018 before the drought, this was the size of the Puzhal reservoir.

But during the drought it looked like this. The Copernicus Sentinel satellite captured this image on June 15, 2019.

Some restaurants and dozens of hotels were forced to temporary close due to the lack of water. Chennai's water authority cut the entire city's piped water supply by 40%.

Sources: CBS, BBC, and NDTV

Thousands of people were forced to wait in line for hours every day so they could fill cans and containers with water.

Sources: CBS, BBC, and NDTV

And it wasn't just Puzhal that was affected. Here is Chembarambakkam Lake in 2018.

And here it is on July 20, 2019.

Residents even tried to get any water they could from openings in dried up lake beds.

Or used muddy water from the dregs of Chennai's reservoirs.

The drying out of Chennai's lakes and surrounding bodies of water caused a buildup of dead fish.

Source: Business Insider

On June 20, it finally began to rain. But according to a 2018 government think tank report, more than 600 million people face "acute" water shortages, and 21 Indian cities, including Chennai, are likely to run out of groundwater by 2020.

Sources: INSIDER, NITI Aayog