Ak­ile Si­mon

Po­lice from the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) were out in full force ear­ly yes­ter­day as its re­stric­tion on wa­ter took ef­fect.

Three peo­ple from South Trinidad have been charged in con­nec­tion with wast­ing wa­ter. WASA's man­ag­er of Se­cu­ri­ty Ser­vices Mervyn Pierre hailed yes­ter­day's ex­er­cise as a suc­cess. He said: "We were out from 10 pm (Wednes­day) through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go. In the north, we start­ed at San­gre Grande and we vis­it­ed right up to the West­moor­ings area. "So far it has been quite en­cour­ag­ing. We are go­ing to use all our re­sources to ef­fec­tive­ly po­lice the coun­try." Pierre al­so called on cit­i­zens to con­tin­ue to part­ner with WASA as it seeks to man­age the lim­it­ed wa­ter re­sources. He said WASA's com­mu­ni­ty po­lice have stepped up its pa­trols and the ex­er­cise would con­tin­ue for as long as it was nec­es­sary.

From around 5 am, sev­er­al jeeps with WASA po­lice of­fi­cers went in­to the West­moor­ings and Glen­coe com­mu­ni­ty in search of vi­o­la­tors of the law. The of­fi­cers stopped at a house in West­moor­ings to en­quire about a leak which was spot­ted along a dri­ve­way. How­ev­er, a fe­male oc­cu­pant of the house, who peeked through a win­dow, when called out by the of­fi­cers, be­came in­censed af­ter TV cam­era­men be­gan to film the of­fi­cers as they in­quired about the leak. Af­ter ad­mit­ting to the of­fi­cers that the leaks was caused by a faulty stop cock, the woman threat­ened to re­port the in­ci­dent to her at­tor­neys. At an­oth­er house, a cou­ple was caught us­ing a hose, which was con­nect­ed to a pipe in the yard. When ap­proached by the of­fi­cers, the woman ex­plained her kitchen sink was clogged and she was us­ing the hose to clear pos­si­ble de­bris. "I ap­pre­ci­ate what you are say­ing...I do con­serve wa­ter and I al­ways en­cour­age them (her house­hold) to do that. "It just un­for­tu­nate that I have to use it to clear the sink," the woman said.