KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

With Wood­land, San Fran­cique and Pe­nal res­i­dents con­stant­ly hav­ing to re­sort to protest for a pipe-borne wa­ter sup­ply, Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les is now as­sur­ing an up­grade in their sup­ply from once a month to twice a week by the end of April.

Not­ing the past un­rest in these com­mu­ni­ties, Gon­za­les said the is­sue stemmed from in­ad­e­quate in­fra­struc­ture, as the ex­ist­ing eight-inch pipeline along Pluck Road could not meet de­mand.

Dur­ing a tour of WASA’s $26 mil­lion project in the area on Tues­day, he said many res­i­dents re­ceive wa­ter on­ly once every nine to 20 days, with dis­rup­tions some­times ex­tend­ing to 25 days.

Work be­gan two weeks ago to in­stall 4 kilo­me­tres of new 16-inch trans­mis­sion pipelines and 2 km of 12-inch lines, from the M2 Ring Road to Ten­ant Trace and An­tilles Trace to San Fran­cique Road. As of Fri­day, the project was 41 per cent com­plete.

Gon­za­les de­scribed it as a ma­jor in­vest­ment set to im­prove wa­ter ac­cess for 9,600 res­i­dents, while ad­di­tion­al up­grades in Pa­lo Seco would ben­e­fit a fur­ther 40,000 peo­ple.

“This pipeline up­grade will en­sure the car­ry­ing ca­pac­i­ty in­creas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly, pro­vid­ing a sup­ply at least twice per week, which is a ma­jor im­prove­ment from the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion,” Gon­za­les said.

Gon­za­les ex­plained that as com­mu­ni­ties ex­pand, in­fra­struc­ture of­ten be­comes in­ad­e­quate. Gov­ern­ments world­wide must con­tin­u­al­ly in­vest in up­grades and mod­erni­sa­tion to meet in­creas­ing de­mand, he said. Over the past four years, WASA has re­placed over 50 kilo­me­tres of aged pipelines across T&T, sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duc­ing non-rev­enue wa­ter (NRW), he not­ed.

Ad­dress­ing con­cerns about whether there is enough wa­ter to meet the in­creased de­mand, Gon­za­les said most res­i­dents in these ar­eas re­ly on the Thick Vil­lage Boost­er Sta­tion, fed by the Pe­nal and Ca­roni Wa­ter Treat­ment Plants, but said sea­son­al changes of­ten im­pact these fa­cil­i­ties’ pro­duc­tion lev­els. To re­duce de­pen­den­cy on these plants, he said WASA is drilling new wells in Pa­lo Seco and Granville to tap in­to un­der­ground wa­ter re­serves. Gon­za­les said these wells, once op­er­a­tional, will ease the strain on ex­ist­ing sources and in­crease sup­ply to af­fect­ed ar­eas.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing fre­quent com­plaints about road con­di­tions fol­low­ing WASA’s projects, Gon­za­les as­sured res­i­dents that all af­fect­ed roads will be re­stored once work is com­plet­ed. He said Moru­ga and Ma­yaro could see an im­proved wa­ter sup­ply by May.

Re­gard­ing NRW, Gon­za­les said WASA has re­duced re­port­ed leaks from over 5,000 in 2020 to few­er than 1,000 to­day. While this has sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­ered NRW, he said the prob­lem in­cludes cus­tomers—es­pe­cial­ly in­dus­tri­al and com­mer­cial clients—who ex­tract wa­ter but do not pay WASA the cor­rect rates.

To tack­le this, WASA has hired 500 field sur­vey­ors to up­date its cus­tomer data­base. This process will en­sure all cus­tomers are prop­er­ly cat­e­gorised and billed ap­pro­pri­ate­ly.

Asked about oth­er parts of South Trinidad fac­ing sim­i­lar is­sues, Gon­za­les said, “I wish I had the fi­nan­cial re­sources to com­plete all these projects si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, but it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble. Once fund­ing is avail­able, we will con­tin­ue up­grad­ing sup­ply na­tion­wide. To­day, our fo­cus is on Wood­land, but we are al­so work­ing in Moru­ga and Char­lottesville, among oth­er ar­eas,” he said.