[...] in a feat of poor planning, officials surrounded the trees with a 25-acre (10-hectare) carpet of crabgrass that every week receives more than 2 million gallons (9,000 cubic meters) of water, practically drowning the 1,700 trees. "Lima was built atop a desert," Maureen Vilca, a teacher at a private Catholic school, reminded her students as they sat under the trees on a recent school day. Pomacondor said the majority of Lima's 9 million residents have little notion of how scarce a resource water is in the capital despite the fact that annual rainfall rarely exceeds a third of an inch (9 millimeters.) While an estimated 700,000 residents have no access to running water, the rest consume an average of 66 gallons (250 liters) a day, more than their counterparts in other Andean capitals such as Bogota, Quito or La Paz.