Water relief in the works

The north and central parts of the island which have been affected by water shortages have been assured by Minister of Energy and Water Resources Wilfred Abrahams that they will not have a repeat of last year’s Christmas fiasco.

Speaking today to the media on the sidelines of a presentation to the students of St Christopher Primary, Abrahams stressed that it was the number one priority of the Barbados Water Authority to solve the issues affecting these parishes. Residents in areas of St Joseph, St Thomas and St John continue to experience water outages or low-pressure problems along their distribution network.

The Minister revealed that the BWA was upgrading their pumps and increasing the water supply to the north to tackle the irregularity.

“Our equipment is very sensitive and a lot of the pumps are very sensitive so if [Barbados] Light & Power has an outage or a surge it tends to knock out our pumps,” Abrahams explained.

“You sometimes have to pump from one reservoir to feed other reservoirs up the line so although you may be pumping, if you have a lot of users on the line between the source and the next reservoir by the time it gets there, there is not a lot of water to fill the reservoir,” he continued.

The Minister of Water Resources disclosed that there would soon be a connection from the Ionics Freshwater Desalination Plant to the water scarce parishes to increase the supply and generate more water.

“The connection is soon going to be made to allow the desalination plant to provide water to the water scarce and to top up water reservoirs that can’t be done with the existing water supply we have now,” said Abrahams, while adding that his ministry was “actively working” to have the water shortages resolved.