Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

Armed with emp­ty buck­ets and bar­rels, res­i­dents of Mon De­sir, Del­hi Road, Fyz­abad, yes­ter­day protest­ed for wa­ter. One res­i­dent, Se­ma Ramku­mar, came out with a clothes bas­ket as she com­plained that she had to do her laun­dry at her rel­a­tives’ homes. Res­i­dent Sharon Nichols-De­o­raj ex­plained that WASA sev­ered their pipeline con­nec­tion dur­ing the con­struc­tion of the Mon De­sir seg­ment of the Point Fortin high­way.  

“They told us they have to dis­con­nect the sup­ply be­cause they have to dig up and do what they have to do and we will be re­con­nect­ed to the reg­u­lar 24/7 sup­ply that the oth­er side of the high­way is get­ting every sin­gle day. To this date, the high­way is com­plet­ed, the road is paved and we don’t have no wa­ter.”

She com­plained that they could no longer con­tin­ue liv­ing un­der these con­di­tions. “We can­not clean, chil­dren can­not go to school. We are back to the old time days. This is a de­plorable sit­u­a­tion. Ba­sic com­modi­ties in a coun­try are roads, wa­ter, lights and prop­er drainage. Wa­ter is our main ne­ces­si­ty.”

An up­set Ra­jku­mar said that they still have to pay their WASA bill. “We will call WASA, I have been on hold for two hours just to get a ref­er­ence num­ber (to re­quest wa­ter),” she said.  

Coun­cil­lor Deryck Bowrin said while WASA was point­ing fin­gers at NID­CO and vice ver­sa, res­i­dents are suf­fer­ing. He said all that was need­ed to re­store wa­ter to the com­mu­ni­ty was a 200-foot pipeline. He al­so com­plained about the de­plorable state of the road. Mean­while, Siparia May­or Dood­nath Mayrhoo said the cor­po­ra­tion has re­ceived hun­dreds of calls from res­i­dents for wa­ter, but sup­ply­ing wa­ter is not the cor­po­ra­tion’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

WASA re­sponds

WASA yes­ter­day said they had ex­pe­ri­enced some chal­lenges with pro­vid­ing a re­li­able sup­ply to some cus­tomers lo­cat­ed along Mon De­sir, Del­hi Road.

“In par­tic­u­lar, there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 15 hous­es lo­cat­ed be­tween LP 15 and LP 20, which are at the ex­trem­i­ties of the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem and whose sup­ply is al­so be­ing im­pact­ed by an aged, en­crust­ed four-inch cast iron pipeline. The wa­ter sup­ply sched­ule to the gen­er­al area has al­so been ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by re­cent shut­downs at the Ca­roni and Point Lisas De­sali­na­tion Plant.”

WASA will con­tin­ue to pro­vide a truck-borne ser­vice to the af­fect­ed cus­tomers in the area, while they fi­nalise a per­ma­nent so­lu­tion.

“This in­cludes the re­place­ment of the en­crust­ed four-inch pipeline, as well as the in­stal­la­tion of a new pipeline to con­nect across the new high­way. Both projects are ex­pect­ed to be ex­e­cut­ed in 2024.”

WASA promised to con­tin­ue mon­i­tor­ing the sup­ply to the area close­ly and pro­vide a sup­ple­men­tary truck-borne ser­vice where re­quired.