The time has come for all who live, move and have their being on this 166-square-miles outcrop of rock in the Atlantic to recognize the importance of water conservation.
As the island continues to face a prolonged drought which has led to drier aquifers and reservoirs, water outages have become the norm.
Households in the northern parishes of St Lucy, St Peter, St Joseph and St Andrew, have been the ones most heavily affected.
Stories of dry taps and ‘brown water’ abound. Despite all the assurances from the Barbados Water Authority, there is no guarantee that their misery will end anytime soon.
The BWA is trying its best to find solutions. It has embarked on several programmes aimed at improving the island’s water accessibility and ageing distribution network.
With water outages occurring not only faster but longer and more widespread, the BWA launched two projects in an effort to address the issue.
Minister of Water Resources Wilfred Abrahams recently revealed that the BWA had commissioned a brand new pumping station at Trent’s, St James, which should provide some relief to those people most affected.
Additionally, the Minister announced it had entered into an arrangement with Ionics Freshwater Limited to provide an additional three million gallons of water daily, which would increase the BWA’s pumping capacity by 50 per cent.
But here’s the thing: no matter what initiatives are employed by the BWA, if Barbadians do not begin to seriously conserve water, the situation on this island is going to get even worse.
The levels of rainfall certainly aren’t going to get much better during this drought, with lower than average rainfall in the forecast for Barbados for the rest of the year.
While the country continues luckily to evade dangerous and possibly disastrous weather systems, it has also meant that the rainfall which usually accompanies those rainy season tropical waves, troughs and disturbances have also been missing.
The drought has created such a headache for the BWA that the prohibition period which was scheduled to end this month has been pushed back to the end of November.
Barbados has been identified as one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, with its per capita water use greater than what is naturally available. But this has not seemingly changed the habits of those who continue to take the water flowing through their taps for granted.
It is still a common sight to see people washing cars and wetting gardens with hoses, while a large percentage of the population do not own water tanks or have them on their properties.
While there is a clear push towards renewable energy – with Barbados having set 2030 as its target to stop using fossil fuels – there is no such enthusiasm for encouraging people to be more water-efficient.
While the switch to solar energy can be an expensive undertaking, sometimes costing thousands of dollars in upfront costs, conserving water is much cheaper.
As recently explained by Abrahams, something as simple as utilizing a water-efficient toilet can save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water daily.
Measures such as reducing the lengths of baths, using rainwater to wash a vehicle or water a garden, turning off the tap when brushing teeth or waiting for a full load in the washing machine or dishwasher are all much cheaper options.
No one on this island can live without water. It is therefore imperative that we preserve the most valuable commodity on the planet.
