Persistent water shortages in Redman’s Village and Kew Land, St Thomas, have prompted the Democratic Labour Party’s shadow spokesman on health to call on Government to address the problem urgently by installing a larger water main in the area.
Paul Gibson complained that residents had been without water for 48 hours and contended that the problem was due to an age-old main that had never been replaced.
He said: “For over 30-something years, the lovely people of this area have been having challenges with water supply. Now the issue is that for the last 30 years we have had a three-inch main serving both Kew Land and Redman’s Village.
“The issue before us is that government upon government has come here and they have allowed the size of the main to remain the same size for over 30 years while the population has expanded.
“Now we are trying to bring awareness to the fact that the people in Redman’s Village have been without water for 48 hours. We have a lot of volcanic dust, which has sulphur and sulphur dioxide in it and causes a lot of skin irritation, a lot of asthma and so on. They can’t even wet down their lawns, they can’t even wet down their houses because there is no water.
“I’m calling on the Government and the authorities to immediately install a four to five-inch pipe into this area to facilitate the movement of water to the houses. The people of Kew Land continue to suffer with water outages daily. There are four or five tanks in this area and in 2021 we are filling five tanks and having Barbadians walking with buckets of water and basins of water and gallons of water to get water to bathe, to brush your teeth and this kind of thing. This ought not to be.”
A resident told Barbados TODAY the situation had become overbearing.
“It’s not fair because sometimes water does come on at four o’clock in the morning and by 6:30 a.m. sometimes even 6 a.m. it gone. It don’t be fair that we paying a water bill every month and you hardly getting water,” he said.
Another resident who has been living in Redman Village for the past 32 years also complained that outages occurred at least six months out of every year.
“We really need something done in Redman’s Village,” she maintained. (RB)
