Aged pipes, silt reason for brown water in St Lucy, says BWA official

A build-up of silt and the highly-aged water supply infrastructure are responsible for the brown-coloured water coming out of taps in St Lucy.

Water Quality Specialist at the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) Alex Ifill gave that explanation during Monday’s Parish Speaks town hall meeting at the Daryll Jordan Secondary School in St Lucy.

He was responding to complaints from residents of the northernmost parish that occasionally, over the last several months, their water supply has been brown.

Ifill said the reason for this was multilayered but stemmed from the aged pipes across the parish.

“There are some significant problems in St Lucy as it relates to brown water. It is a two-fold problem; we have a very aged network, it breaks constantly and causes disruptions in the service and, therefore, causes brown water,” he explained.

“At Allendale over the past few years, we have noticed siltation. Siltation is a natural process but usually it takes 30, 40 years for a significant amount of silt to accumulate. In the past few years, with the constant change [in rainfall], these things have acted to accelerate the siltation at Allendale,” Ifill added.

BWA’s Director of Engineering Charles Leslie, who was also at the town hall meeting, said that despite the replacement of a large number of pipes and mains across Barbados over the past several years, the Authority gets about 1 200 complaints every month about breakages in its system.

“We have about 110 000 to 115 000 customers, so that is about one per cent of our network that is breaking constantly every month, and a lot of those lines have aged,” he said. 

“We are doing a replacement now in Rock Dundo replacing some of the lines and as we try to replace some of those lines the main itself is dropping into holes, so we had to do some replacement there as well.” 

Leslie assured that the BWA was pushing forward with several projects to replace aged infrastructure that caused disruptions in its network. (SB)