Limited access, aging pipes plague water restoration work

Despite progress in returning full water access to customers, the Barbados Water Authority said Tuesday that limited access to some northerly parts of the island in the wake of Hurricane Elsa has hampered its restoration efforts.

And expect more burst mains as water surges through aging mains, BWA General Manager Keithroy Halliday said during a live post-hurricane update.

The current production capacity for distribution continues to increase, but lack of access to remote areas remains an issue for the utility, he told journalists.

He said: “The progress has been relatively good in respect of us getting our facilities back online, and our production capability. At current, we only have eight facilities now on generators, as opposed to being online directly.

“However, our concern is about ensuring that distribution of our water at the end of our distribution systems, in particularly those in the parishes of St. Lucy, St. Peter. St. Joseph, St. John and to some extent St. George and St Thomas. [They] have been the traditional areas which have had challenges whenever we had water problems, and those are the areas now that we are paying particular attention to.

“Some of the challenges that we have had, relates to the fact that we have had difficulty to those remote line stations, we have cleared most of those [and] we are dealing now with only one or two. So our focus right now is how we can alleviate the situation for a number of these areas, that have not had water in some instances for several days.”

As the water system continues to steadily get back online over the next several hours, more customers will eventually see their services returned, Halliday declared.

But he cautioned Barbadians to expect more sightings of burst mains and damaged connections, as water flows into areas that have significantly older infrastructure.

“As the system becomes replenished again, we are going to discover a number of bursts occurring, which is what would have impeded some of the progress we would have had on some of the fringes,” said the BWA General manager. “Simply because of ageing infrastructure, and as water surges through the mains again, we typically find ourselves seeing more burst mains.

“In terms of our generational capacity, our backups, we have found that works well. We have had some negative complaints notwithstanding, but appreciate that two years ago, we have half the generational capacity that we have, and certainly through the year into the next year, we should resolve the remaining generational back up capacity.”
(KS)