Ak­ile Si­mon

Vil­lages that do not have ac­cess to a wa­ter sup­ply are ex­pect­ed to ben­e­fit from some 500 wa­ter tanks, re­cent­ly bought by the Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty (WASA).

That an­nounce­ment came mere hours be­fore wa­ter re­stric­tions took ef­fect yes­ter­day morn­ing. Ac­cord­ing to WASA's act­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Dr Jim Lee Young, no com­mu­ni­ty across T&T would be left with­out wa­ter as the coun­try pre­pares to bat­tle with a se­vere dry sea­son. Lee Young was a guest on the Mar­cia Henville Show on Pow­er 102.1FM on Wednes­day. He said: "We have read­just­ed our sched­ules be­cause of the amount of wa­ter we are pro­duc­ing from our dams where the lev­els are low. We have to cut back there, to en­sure as far as pos­si­ble, every­body is get­ting wa­ter, at least one day a week.

"Vil­lages in the coun­try­side who have re­lied on wa­ter in wells, springs and rivers...for those peo­ple who are not con­nect­ed to a net­work, what we are do­ing is putting 'com­mu­nal tanks' in their vil­lages. "The fact that peo­ple can't get tanks in the hard­ware stores is be­cause WASA has gone and bought all the tanks in Trinidad," he said. Lee Young al­so lashed out at con­sumers say­ing 67 per cent of leaks take place on pri­vate prop­er­ties. "There are a host of things that we are go­ing to be do­ing; we are putting in tanks, portable wa­ter treat­ment plants, de­sali­na­tion plants and 34 wells are be­ing con­struct­ed as we speak." He said these projects are ex­pect­ed to come in­to be­ing with­in the next three to six months.