Soyi­ni Grey

Cli­mate change is be­ing blamed for a re­duc­tion in the reg­u­lar sup­ply of wa­ter to cus­tomers in Cen­tral and South Trinidad.

De­sal­cott and WASA are blam­ing al­gae blooms for the fail­ure of the De­sali­na­tion Plant to meet its con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion to sup­ply the au­thor­i­ty with 40 Mil­lion Im­pe­r­i­al Gal­lons per Day (MIGD). Cur­rent­ly, it is de­liv­er­ing clos­er to 37 MIGD, which is af­fect­ing the 242,000 cus­tomers ser­viced by the Ca­roni plant.

“When the De­sali­na­tion Plant in Point Lisas was first built, we didn’t en­counter any al­gae blooms un­til about 2006. Ow­ing to cli­mate change, in­creased am­bi­ent sea wa­ter tem­per­a­tures, we’ve been see­ing more al­gae over the years,” De­sal­cott gen­er­al man­ag­er John Thomp­son said dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties in St Clair, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

He said they now spend two-thirds of their time deal­ing with al­gae blooms that are clog­ging up their fil­tra­tion sys­tems and re­duc­ing their ca­pac­i­ty.

How­ev­er, he is hope­ful that they have seen the worst of the blooms for this year.

“In past years, the al­gae blooms have been at their worst in Feb­ru­ary and March and af­ter that they’ve de­creased. It is last­ing rather longer this year,” he said.

WASA ac­knowl­edged that the cus­tomers most af­fect­ed were based in Cen­tral and South Trinidad.

The Au­thor­i­ty’s Di­rec­tor of Op­er­a­tions, Shaira Ali, re­vealed, “We have seen ar­eas as in Freeport, Wa­ter­loo, in Cou­va, Cal­i­for­nia, Dow Vil­lage, Bal­main, some ar­eas in Clax­ton Bay and en­vi­rons, Pointe-a-Pierre, even stretch­ing as far as San Fer­nan­do.”

Cus­tomers in the South-West penin­su­la would al­so feel the neg­a­tive ef­fects of re­duced wa­ter pres­sure and an al­tered wa­ter sched­ule. These in­clude peo­ple liv­ing in Philip­pine, La Ro­main, Her­mitage, Ota­heite, Rousil­lac and La Brea.

WASA said work has al­ready be­gun to mit­i­gate the strain on cus­tomers.

Act­ing CEO Kelvin Ro­main ex­plained, “In terms of mit­i­gat­ing against that, we try to move around the wa­ter in the South re­gion us­ing oth­er sources of sup­ply, par­tic­u­lar­ly in ar­eas where we could use our lo­calised plants such as Pe­nal and Siparia.”

Cur­rent­ly, the wa­ter lev­els in WASA’s dams are good and there is no wa­ter re­stric­tion pol­i­cy in place.

The wa­ter lev­el at the Hol­lis Dam is at 54 per cent ca­pac­i­ty, which is the low­est of the four dams. Longterm ca­pac­i­ty is 70 per cent. Navet is at 64 per cent (long-term ca­pac­i­ty—76 per cent), while lev­els at Are­na and Hills­bor­ough at above the long-term lev­els. WASA said this will al­low the util­i­ty to tap in­to wa­ter sources to serve cus­tomers af­fect­ed by the short­fall in the sup­ply from De­sal­cott.

How­ev­er, the De­sali­na­tion Plant’s gen­er­al man­ag­er as­sures they are do­ing all they can to ad­dress the prob­lem head-on. Thomp­son said most com­pa­nies in their po­si­tion would not have been able to func­tion and prob­a­bly have had to shut down com­plete­ly.

“De­sal­cott has won the gold medal as the best op­er­at­ing de­sal plant in the world in 2019. So, it’s no lack of ex­per­tise in how to deal with this,” he said.

“The very fact that our re­duc­tion is rel­a­tive­ly small is amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing the con­di­tions.”