Ke­jan Haynes

WASA Chair­man Ravin­dra Nan­ga has fol­lowed in the foot­steps of Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les, prais­ing the WASA work­ers who re­paired the rup­tured 48-inch pipeline last week, while al­so con­demn­ing those in tra­di­tion­al and so­cial me­dia who crit­i­cised, and in some cas­es spread mis­in­for­ma­tion about them.

“It is un­for­tu­nate that two of our dai­ly news­pa­pers opt­ed to by-pass the facts and crit­i­cize all the face­less WASA work­ers who, in the face of un­fore­seen and un­prece­dent­ed cir­cum­stances, did every­thing with­in their pow­er, work­ing through sleep­less nights, to ad­dress the cri­sis and get wa­ter back in­to peo­ple’s homes as quick­ly as pos­si­ble,” Nan­ga said in a let­ter sent to the me­dia to­day. “Worse were the in­di­vid­u­als who took to so­cial me­dia to de­lib­er­ate­ly spread mis­in­for­ma­tion and, in some cas­es, bla­tant false­hoods, all in an at­tempt to dis­cred­it WASA and the hard-work­ing en­gi­neers and tech­ni­cians, who were busi­ly at work restor­ing the wa­ter for their very crit­ics.”

Nan­ga said last week’s rup­ture was a lot worse than orig­i­nal­ly re­port­ed based in the pre­lim­i­nary as­sess­ment. Work­ers even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered that a 48-inch con­crete-en­cased steel pipe, which had been laid in the mid-1970s, had in fact im­plod­ed.

The WASA Chair­man said of­fi­cials worked hard to keep the pub­lic no­ti­fied on the progress of the re­pairs through me­dia con­fer­ences. He said look­ing for­ward, work has com­menced on a long-term so­lu­tion by in­stalling 280ft of 48-inch steel trans­mis­sion surge pipeline but there are more com­pli­ca­tions.

“Dur­ing ex­plorato­ry works, an ex­ten­sive truss block sup­port­ing the con­crete-en­cased steel pipe was dis­cov­ered in the area of the Surge Tank,” he ex­plained. “This has com­pli­cat­ed the re­place­ment process, and it is now nec­es­sary to re-route the new pipeline, as any work in the area of the truss block, risks rup­tur­ing the cur­rent pipeline and once again cut­ting off sup­ply. WASA is tak­ing all steps to avoid any new dam­age to the ex­ist­ing pipeline.”

He said WASA is cur­rent­ly map­ping the new route to en­sure that it is ac­cept­able and ex­ca­va­tion and fab­ri­ca­tion works will com­mence short­ly.

He ex­pects work to take an­oth­er two weeks but promis­es con­tin­gency mea­sures have been put in place, in or­der to min­imise fur­ther im­pact on the sup­ply to cus­tomers.

Nan­go ex­plained, once these re­pairs are com­plet­ed, in the near fu­ture a sec­ond line, uti­liz­ing HDPE tech­nol­o­gy will be in­stalled as a re­dun­dan­cy sys­tem, in or­der to en­sure that this oc­cur­rence is not re­peat­ed.