The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) can now bet­ter de­tect and lo­cate leaks in their wa­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work.

In con­junc­tion with WASA, the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) has in­stalled 125 re­mote flow and pres­sure mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions across the coun­try’s five ma­jor wa­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works.

The project was fund­ed by the IDB’s US$315 mil­lion line of cred­it for Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al Wa­ter Trans­for­ma­tion Pro­gramme.

Ac­cord­ing to the IDB, this ini­tial op­er­a­tion will in­clude in­sti­tu­tion­al strength­en­ing and ca­pac­i­ty build­ing to help the coun­try’s Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties and WASA im­prove their gov­er­nance and sus­tain­able man­age­ment of wa­ter re­sources.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, IDB Wa­ter and San­i­ta­tion Spe­cial­ist Gilroy Lewis said these smart me­ters will mea­sure pro­duc­tion pres­sures and flows from dif­fer­ent reser­voirs and wa­ter treat­ment plants.

“The in­for­ma­tion will come to one sys­tem, where you will have an au­to­mat­ed da­ta man­age­ment sys­tem. Then, you will know how much wa­ter is be­ing pro­duced by Ca­roni, by Navet, and so on with dash­boards,” Lewis said.

The IDB ap­proved a US$80 mil­lion loan in De­cem­ber last year to T&T as part of the over­all cred­it line. The IDB says this pro­gramme will di­rect­ly ben­e­fit over one mil­lion res­i­dents of T&T.