Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) says it is man­ag­ing the sup­ply of wa­ter in To­ba­go de­spite chal­lenges dur­ing the cru­cial East­er pe­ri­od.

In a What­sApp mes­sage to Guardian Me­dia on Sat­ur­day, Giselle Web­ster, man­ag­er of WASA To­ba­go, said, “Fol­low­ing the re­cent acts of van­dal­ism, the team was able to en­sure a pipe-borne sup­ply was re­turned. As you would ap­pre­ci­ate, the East­er week­end an­nu­al­ly presents an in­flux of vis­i­tors to the is­land, so there will be chal­lenges. How­ev­er, this is fa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry for us at WASA, and we will ad­dress any chal­lenges pre­sent­ed.”

Web­ster added that the sup­ply sched­ule has been re­vised, and a truck-borne ser­vice re­mains ac­ti­vat­ed to as­sist res­i­dents.

The sup­ply of wa­ter was dis­rupt­ed in 17 ar­eas af­ter van­dals tar­get­ed elec­tri­cal ca­bles and T&TEC me­ters be­tween March 27 and 28.

Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine con­demned the ac­tions as “bor­der­line do­mes­tic ter­ror­ism,” not­ing that 2.1 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter were lost per day.

At a me­dia con­fer­ence on March 29, Bri­an Williams, head of WASA’s To­ba­go re­gion, es­ti­mat­ed re­pairs would be com­plet­ed with­in a cou­ple of days but cau­tioned that there would be a lag in the full re­turn of the wa­ter sup­ply.

Last Tues­day, nine peo­ple, in­clud­ing a WASA em­ploy­ee, were ar­rest­ed in con­nec­tion with the van­dal­ism.

Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Rod­hill Kirk con­firmed on Sun­day that no charges have yet been laid.