The Belle Pumping Station, which provides water to more than 30, 000 Barbados Water Authority (BWA) customers, should be back up and running within a matter of days. That’s according to the BWA, which is carrying out emergency work to the pumping station.
During a tour of the station along the Belle Plantation officials from the Ministry of Transport, Works and Water Resources informed that the pumping station was well over seven decades old and in critical need of repair.
Minister within the Ministry of Transport, Works and Water Resources, Dr Romel Springer, said that his ministry felt the need to start the work soon so as to not risk a major breakdown.
“The Belle Pumping Station is a critical piece of infrastructure that supports other essential services, but as you can well appreciate, this facility is well over 70 years old and in desperate need of repairs and maintenance. We felt the need to start this work as soon as possible so as not to risk what could be considered a catastrophic failure if the substructure that supports the pumping station fails,” he told members of the media.
Springer promised that communities in need of water will be supplied instantly should they be experiencing water shortages.
General Manager of the BWA, Keithroy Halliday, said that work carried out on Sunday will be to repair the substructure and infrastructure of the station.
“The Belle Pumping Station caters to roughly 30, 000 of our customers and so the significance cannot be underscored enough. What we are doing today is conducting several repair works or activities to improve [its] substructure and infrastructure,” he said.
Within the next couple of days, the BWA teams will go into the wells to cut out and replace members of the substructure. This, Halliday said, will allow them to continue to the next stage.
Director of Engineering at the BWA, Charles Leslie, explained that due to the nature of the work, several hours of water outages may be experienced, but repairs should be completed by Tuesday April 12th.
“This work is going to be done over a period of two days, where we will be stopping and starting periodically so that we can get the work done. Right now, the station is offline and has been offline from 11 a.m. and we anticipate it will be offline until about 2 p.m. What the guys are doing is securing the system so that we can stop at 2 p.m. and start back around 6 p.m.
“During that pumping period we will be repairing the structure and once we have done that repair around 6 p.m., we will stop again and reconnect the station so it can pump overnight and then tomorrow we will be back on site to repair another section of the structure,” he explained.
Customers have been asked to store adequate supplies of water over the next few days, although water tankers have been assigned based on the possible shortages which may occur.
