On World Wa­ter Day, which was com­mem­o­rat­ed yes­ter­day, the biggest trend­ing sto­ry in T&T was about a judg­ment de­liv­ered against the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) in the Port-of-Spain High Court.

That alone sums up the state of the pub­lic util­i­ty which has con­sis­tent­ly failed for decades to pro­vide a safe and re­li­able sup­ply of wa­ter.

WASA has been or­dered to pay a lit­tle over $1.7 mil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion to Janet Rousseau, whose Up­per Pash­ley Street, Suc­cess Vil­lage, Laven­tille home was de­stroyed by a burst wa­ter main.

Ms Rousseau first no­ticed prob­lems caused by the leak­ing main short­ly af­ter con­struct­ing her home in De­cem­ber 2003. How­ev­er, it took four years for the leak to be re­paired and by that time, ir­repara­ble dam­age had been done to the house.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, Rousseau’s case is not an iso­lat­ed one. It is one of sev­er­al wor­ry­ing ex­am­ples of how WASA has failed to pro­vide the ser­vice it was set up to do.

Yes­ter­day, on World Wa­ter Day, the Unit­ed Na­tions put the spot­light on ac­cel­er­at­ing change to solve the glob­al wa­ter and san­i­ta­tion cri­sis, but WASA’s ca­pac­i­ty to fa­cil­i­tate this type of trans­for­ma­tion re­mains very much in doubt.

While the glob­al cam­paign, Be the Change, placed the onus on in­di­vid­u­als to change the way they use, con­sume and man­age wa­ter, WASA’s chron­ic mal­func­tions make it dif­fi­cult to achieve that ob­jec­tive.

In this na­tion where leak­ing pipelines and dry faucets are the norm rather than the ex­cep­tion, con­sumers have very few op­tions when it comes to man­ag­ing their wa­ter us­age.

WASA has be­come so well known for un­der­per­for­mance that a re­cent claim by Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les that a back­log of over 5,000 leaks had been erad­i­cat­ed was greet­ed with wide­spread scep­ti­cism.

Al­so, cit­i­zens are still not con­vinced there has been an in­crease in wa­ter pro­duc­tion, al­though Min­is­ter Gon­za­les claims this has been achieved be­cause 20 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter a day are no longer be­ing lost to leaks.

On World Wa­ter Day, many WASA cus­tomers were with­out a pipe-borne sup­ply and leak­ing trans­mis­sion lines were de­tect­ed in many parts of the coun­try.

Most cit­i­zens still see WASA as the cash-strapped en­ti­ty plagued by fi­nan­cial mis­man­age­ment, cor­rup­tion and low pro­duc­tiv­i­ty de­scribed in painful de­tail in a 135-page re­port sub­mit­ted to Cab­i­net fol­low­ing a di­rec­tive by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley over a year ago.

Min­is­ter Gon­za­les, now over­see­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a plan to turn around WASA, should be well aware of the need to de­liv­er mea­sur­able re­sults.

There has hard­ly been a time, since WASA’s es­tab­lish­ment in Sep­tem­ber 1965, that it has not been plagued with in­ef­fi­cien­cies. Nu­mer­ous plans to re­ha­bil­i­tate it, of­ten at great cost to tax­pay­ers, have yield­ed lit­tle or no re­sults.

The most re­cent, a three-year $1.2 bil­lion Wa­ter Sec­tor Mod­erni­sa­tion Pro­gramme (WSMP), floun­dered about a decade ago.

With such a track record, it is no won­der the Min­is­ter’s pos­i­tive re­ports and op­ti­mistic pro­jec­tions have not been en­thu­si­as­ti­cal­ly re­ceived by cit­i­zens.

Noth­ing less than tan­gi­ble ev­i­dence of WASA’s trans­for­ma­tion—a 24/7 sup­ply of pipe-borne wa­ter and a marked de­crease in rup­tured mains and leak­ing trans­mis­sion lines—will do af­ter al­most six decades of fail­ures.

Hope­ful­ly, there will be clear signs of a turn­around by the time World Wa­ter Day 2024 comes around.