RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

De­spite fix­ing 5,000 leaks in the past two years, the Wa­ter and Sewage Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) still has over 1,500 leaks to ad­dress, which leads to a stag­ger­ing loss of 90 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter each day.

This rev­e­la­tion came from WASA chair­man Ravin­dra Nan­ga dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee meet­ing last week in re­sponse to a ques­tion posed by UNC Sen­a­tor Anil Roberts.

Speak­ing at the com­mit­tee meet­ing on Thurs­day, which fo­cused on the ef­fi­cien­cy of road re­pairs, land slip­pages and land­slides through­out T&T, Roberts raised con­cerns about the con­tin­u­ous flow of wa­ter un­der roads, bridges and hous­es, lead­ing to dam­age to in­fra­struc­ture foun­da­tions. He re­quest­ed in­for­ma­tion on the amount of wast­ed wa­ter and the im­pact it had on road in­fra­struc­ture.

Nan­ga ac­knowl­edged that WASA had faced a back­log of 5,000 leaks in its sys­tem. He said through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a dig­i­tal dash­board, they were able to ad­dress and re­pair all those leaks. Nev­er­the­less, he added there are still 1,500 cur­rent leaks that need at­ten­tion.

Nan­ga not­ed that leak­ages will per­sist un­til there is a sig­nif­i­cant re­place­ment of age­ing in­fra­struc­ture.

“We con­tin­u­ous­ly face this is­sue and have tak­en steps to ad­dress leaks and de­vel­op road restora­tion plans,” Nan­ga added.

Mean­while, WASA’s Op­er­a­tions Man­ag­er, Sa­haira Ali, re­vealed that short­ages of bi­tu­men have been hin­der­ing their road restora­tion ef­forts. She ex­plained that WASA’s pro­cure­ment de­part­ment had ex­plored in­ter­nal and in­ter­na­tion­al sources to over­come the bi­tu­men short­fall.

“We have in­stances where we have faced a short­fall of bi­tu­men. This is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent when fix­ing roads, so if this is short, we can­not suc­cess­ful­ly com­plete the road re­pairs,” she added.

Dur­ing the com­mit­tee meet­ing, Dr Trevor Townsend, pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al En­gi­neers of Trinidad and To­ba­go (APETT), raised con­cerns about the qual­i­ty of WASA’s tem­po­rary road re­pairs. He stressed the im­por­tance of all per­ma­nent road works car­ried out by WASA meet­ing en­gi­neer­ing stan­dards.

Dr Townsend cau­tioned that these tem­po­rary re­pairs would not hold up hen there is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of wa­ter flow­ing be­neath the sur­face.

He said the per­sist­ing is­sue of leaks and the sub­se­quent wa­ter loss were on­go­ing chal­lenges for WASA, not­ing that the Au­thor­i­ty faces the task of re­plac­ing age­ing in­fra­struc­ture to min­imise fu­ture leaks.

WASA CEO Kelvin Ro­maine, in an in­ter­view af­ter the JSC, ex­plained that the 90 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter wast­ed due to leaks, ac­cord­ing to a fig­ure tab­u­lat­ed in 2021. He not­ed, how­ev­er, that there could be a re­duc­tion as 5,000 leaks were fixed.

He said: “This rep­re­sents about 35 per cent of sys­tem in­put. Re­mem­ber, in­her­ent in any dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work is leak­age. This means that you will al­ways have leaks, vis­i­ble and back­ground leak­age.”

He said WASA’s to­tal pro­duc­tion is 240 mil­lion bar­rels of wa­ter per day.