The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) is in­sist­ing that lands sit­u­at­ed at the Co­corite Far­rell Well Field will be utilised. WASA was ad­dress­ing state­ments made by Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley, who on Fri­day stat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment was ne­glect­ing his con­stituents by with­hold­ing projects for their de­vel­op­ment. WASA's gen­er­al man­ag­er of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions Ellen Lewis, in a press re­lease yes­ter­day ex­plained that the lo­ca­tion of WASA's well field at West­moor­ings, Co­corite was vest­ed in the au­thor­i­ty.

"The site is a lu­cra­tive well­field with 35 arte­sian wells which was first brought in­to op­er­a­tion in 1922 and which the Au­thor­i­ty is seek­ing to grad­u­al­ly re­turn to ac­tive pro­duc­tion in an ef­fort to im­prove the wa­ter sup­ply to com­mu­ni­ties in the Port-of-Spain and Diego Mar­tin ar­eas." Op­er­a­tion of the well field was tem­porar­i­ly dis­con­tin­ued in 1992. In 2010, the Au­thor­i­ty sought to re­ac­ti­vate the well field. "The Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion had sought to chal­lenge the Au­thor­i­ty's le­gal right to own­er­ship."

In an at­tempt to re­solve the sit­u­a­tion, two meet­ings were con­vened with the cor­po­ra­tion. How­ev­er, on Sep­tem­ber 15, the cor­po­ra­tion moved in and re­moved pub­lic no­tice signs the Au­thor­i­ty had erect­ed on the site. The au­thor­i­ty, Lewis stat­ed, has pro­posed to re­turn the well field in ques­tion to pro­duc­tive use whilst main­tain­ing and se­cur­ing this in­valu­able ground wa­ter re­source in the West.