There is bitter irony in the front-page photograph of yesterday's edition of the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian which showed a plainly-labelled WASA truck filling a swimming pool in a private residence in Westmoorings on Wednesday night. WASA's new acting chief executive, Dr Jim Lee Young, and other officials of the water utility, have spent the last three months trying to convince residents of this country to conserve water in the face of the most serious drought experienced in the Caribbean in decades. In its public campaign to encourage conservation of water, WASA officials have held four news conferences in the last two months at which they have underlined the seriousness of the country's water problems.
The officials have given blow-by-blow accounts of the depleting reserves of water in the country's reservoirs. Given the fact that Trinidad and Tobago has not experienced any significant rainfall in more than four months, most residents have been able to connect the dots of WASA's public appeals for water conservation with the probability that water may run out before the rains begin. Thousands of residents across this country have been forced by the circumstances to abide by the water restrictions which have meant the availability of water on fewer days than they are accustomed. Adjustments have been made to lifestyles and operations at an individual and corporate level as the seriousness of taps running dry, even for a few days, has permeated the public consciousness.
The fact that a WASA official was able to request that people learn to bathe with buckets instead of in showers–a practice that is alien to large swathes of this population–and that this advice has been heeded was an indication that WASA had achieved the moral upperhand in calling for widespread sacrifice in the face of crisis. WASA has achieved a great deal in the short period that Dr Lee Young has been at its helm. It has formulated plans to increase water production, upped its leak detection and solution game, promised to mitigate the corruption that has been endemic in the institution and done an outstanding job of communicating the seriousness of the water situation by both its words and its action. The progress he has made may account for the anger and sense of betrayal in Dr Lee Young's voice as he deemed the actions of the WASA truck on Wednesday night as an "abuse of what we are trying to do."
We support his pledge to investigate what appears to be an unofficial use of the utility's resources as this may be interpreted by many reading yesterday's lead story as a double standard–WASA calling on the public to conserve, while the utility is doing the opposite. The apparent double standard must be made worse by the fact that the house in Westmoorings is being leased by WASA to accommodate a foreign national who has been identified to fill the position of chief executive officer. What new, foreign CEO coming into an organisation like WASA would be comfortable knowing that the utility, faced with a drought, is using litres of precious water to fill the pool for him to swim in rather than distributing it to some of the thousands of residents who now receive water once a week.
Knowledgeable construction sources were quick to dismiss the utility's official position that a pool full of water could be needed for "construction purposes" involving the renovation of a residential house. The person responsible for ordering the WASA truck to pump water into the Westmoorings pool has placed the utility in an invidious and embarrassing position. In effect, the person has jeopardised WASA's water conservation campaign by exposing the utility to ridicule and public cynicism. Will there be a price to pay for inflicting such mischief on the rejuvenated utility?