Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport and Water Resources Santia Bradshaw has announced plans to bring relief to St Lucy residents plagued with water shortages and quality issues.
Speaking to the media at Round de Rock, St Lucy after a tour of several affected communities in the parish on Tuesday, Bradshaw said the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) had sourced additional community water tanks that will be placed in areas impacted by shortages of the resource.
As a long-term solution, she added, St Lucy is being treated as high priority on the BWA’s aggressive mains replacement programme and plans are in the works to build two desalination plants at Hope and Colleton.
“We are also going to have to accelerate some of the programmes, particularly in the area that we are in right now in Round de Rock, because it is clear that because of the elevation of this area that these persons are encountering a situation where there is no water actually coming to their taps at all,” Bradshaw said.
“And, therefore, I think that that has to be given greater priority than those who are getting water and water is brown. We already have a community tank up here but I think the Water Authority has been able to source a number of water tanks for which we have agreed, just this afternoon, that we will prioritize these types of areas and some of the other households that we recognise that are in dire need of having a constant water supply,” she added.
The Water Resources Minister indicated that while residents in certain areas were also complaining about water quality, plans were being rolled out to address and investigate concerns regarding the maintenance of the well at Allendale, which was last cleaned in 2003.
Bradshaw said she had been advised that cleaning that well will be a technical and dangerous undertaking and will require a certain level of expertise.
“It therefore means that we had to find an alternative source to be able to get water and the Barbados Water Authority has investigated the area at the old St Joseph Hospital and they have already put plans in place to make that transition to make it a little bit easier to have proper access to water in this community,” she said.
“However, over the 24-hour period after our discussions about how we were going to come into the community and engage in discussions with the residents about that transition and what will be required in terms of access to water and how we would have to put certain things in place to accommodate them, we then had a burst to the water pump at Allendale and that further compounded the issues that we had. So, you would hear a lot of the residents complaining about the brown water that has been going to the taps.
“A number of them have been complaining, obviously, of the shortages of water that they have been getting…. I think the public has to appreciate that these things take time, in terms of being able to transfer water from one source to the other,” Minister Bradshaw added.
Meanwhile, BWA’s Director of Engineering Charles Leslie explained that an agent will be placed in the well at Allendale to prevent the water from mingling and aggressively attacking the aged pipe network and sending discoloured water to taps.
Additionally, he said, mains replacement has started at the section between Lamberts and Boscobelle and is expected to continue across the parish. The engineer further explained that the desalination plants are expected to augment the water supply, preventing shortages during the dry season.
BWA’s General Manager Keithroy Halliday said discussions have already started on making personal tanks accessible to qualified householders.
“So, we are trying to move with all alacrity to at least ensure that the immediate term solutions are in place while we try to go forward into the medium term. Mr Leslie would have mentioned the fact that we are looking to put two containerised desalination plants into St Lucy to augment what we already have.
“What that simply says is that while we produce, on average, maybe 1.15 million gallons a month for the supply in St Lucy, we know that we need at least 1.5 to two million, and those temporary desalination plants will give us a surplus and effectively give us an element of redundancy,” Halliday explained.
He said the plants are already on the island and efforts are being made to set up at least one of them over the next few months. anestahenry@barbadostoday.bb