Gail Alexan­der

The new Par­lia­ment had been suf­fer­ing from a "mud­dy" dis­coloured wa­ter sup­ply in re­cent days, PNM Sen­a­tor Pen­ny Beck­les said on Mon­day. She was speak­ing in Mon­day night's Sen­ate de­bate on an or­der to in­crease wa­ter rates for the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate. The sit­ting end­ed at 10 pm and the Sen­ate was ad­journed to a date to be fixed. A Gov­ern­ment spokesman said on Mon­day Par­lia­ment was like­ly to re­sume around mid-to-late next month since a Gov­ern­ment team would be in In­dia on a State vis­it ear­ly next month. Dur­ing de­bate, Beck­les, not­ing there had been a wa­ter prob­lem in the Par­lia­ment build­ing re­cent­ly, said the prob­lem still ex­ist­ed in Wood­brook, St James, Co­corite and West­moor­ings.

"A num­ber of cus­tomers in Port-of-Spain are still re­ceiv­ing a brown sup­ply of wa­ter," Beck­les said. Not­ing that PP Sen­a­tor Ver­na St Rose-Greaves had in­di­cat­ed it was a sit­u­a­tion where WASA ac­tu­al­ly did not flush out the sys­tem prop­er­ly but turned on the wa­ter, Beck­les said: "So mem­bers of the pub­lic had to sub­ject them­selves - as some peo­ple have said to me in the West - to lit­er­al­ly see mud­dy wa­ter yes­ter­day and to­day and maybe it would con­tin­ue." Dis­play­ing two bot­tles of dis­coloured wa­ter to the Sen­ate, Beck­les added: "If we look at the wa­ter from Hilton, which is the clear bot­tle - and I ac­tu­al­ly col­lect­ed some from the wa­ter in our tap in the Par­lia­ment right now - you would see the se­ri­ous dis­col­oration of the wa­ter in the Par­lia­ment and this wa­ter that we are drink­ing."

She added: "If WASA was aware that peo­ple were re­ceiv­ing coloured and mud­dy wa­ter, then you would think they would en­sure that the pop­u­la­tion was aware. "I know the min­is­ter in­di­cat­ed they would ad­vise. Well if they did, we in the Par­lia­ment were not ad­vised. I do not know which per­son in the Par­lia­ment was aware to­day that the wa­ter would be dis­coloured." Beck­les added Gov­ern­ment had to un­der­stand if it made promis­es to the pub­lic for elec­tion and raised ex­pec­ta­tions, it had to live with com­plaints if the promis­es re­mained un­ful­filled.