On Mon­day, the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties host­ed a news con­fer­ence, along with their Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) and T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice coun­ter­parts, which ad­dressed the wa­ter sup­ply to the pop­u­la­tion.

One of the cen­tral mes­sages was that WASA’s abil­i­ty to sup­ply wa­ter to house­holds has been im­pact­ed by a harsh­er-than-nor­mal dry sea­son, com­bined with ex­tend­ed heat waves that may have in­creased evap­o­ra­tion from the na­tion’s reser­voirs.

These fac­tors have re­sult­ed in T&T’s four main reser­voirs re­ceiv­ing less rain­fall than pro­ject­ed, with the coun­try’s largest wa­ter re­ten­tion fa­cil­i­ty, the Ca­roni Are­na Dam, re­ceiv­ing 46 per cent less rain­fall than ex­pect­ed. That re­sult­ed in the Ca­roni Are­na fa­cil­i­ty be­ing at 35 per cent ca­pac­i­ty as at April 12, when its long-term av­er­age for that date was 60 per cent. The sit­u­a­tion at the three oth­er reser­voirs is not much bet­ter.

This sim­ply means WASA has less wa­ter avail­able to col­lect, treat and pump to house­holds through­out the coun­try.

WASA op­er­a­tions di­rec­tor Shaira Ali says Trinidad has record­ed a deficit of 33.5 IMGD (im­pe­r­i­al mil­lion gal­lons per day) or ap­prox­i­mate­ly 25 per cent of to­tal ca­pac­i­ty, whilst To­ba­go is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a deficit of 2.85 IMGD or ap­prox­i­mate­ly 43 per cent of to­tal pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty.

She said al­ready, 600,000 peo­ple are im­pact­ed by the re­duc­tion in reser­voir ca­pac­i­ty lev­els and WASA will soon an­nounce new na­tion­al wa­ter sup­ply sched­ules, which is like­ly to mean less wa­ter on few­er days for thou­sands of peo­ple.

Thank­ful­ly, the au­thor­i­ties have put mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures in place to re­duce the im­pact.

These in­clude in­creased wa­ter-truck­ing ca­pac­i­ty; a 24-hour cus­tomer call cen­tre to al­low peo­ple in im­pact­ed com­mu­ni­ties to com­mu­ni­cate their needs ur­gent­ly; re­quest­ing that the two de­sali­na­tion com­pa­nies pro­vide ad­di­tion­al sup­plies of wa­ter; and re­dis­trib­ut­ing sup­ply from com­mu­ni­ties deemed to be more re­silient to ad­verse­ly im­pact­ed ar­eas.

On pa­per, these mea­sures seem to be ad­e­quate but in T&T, the prob­lem is al­ways in the im­ple­men­ta­tion and over­sight of plans and not in the cre­ation of them.

Giv­en the im­por­tance of wa­ter to busi­ness, com­merce, health­care, ed­u­ca­tion and the pub­lic as a whole, we call on Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les to pay spe­cial at­ten­tion to the mon­i­tor­ing of the com­mand cen­tre and the en­hanced cus­tomer call cen­tre, even if it means mak­ing per­son­al ap­pear­ances to en­sure peo­ple are on the job.

The min­is­ter should al­so pro­vide the na­tion with an up­date on the am­bi­tious bil­lion-dol­lar over­haul of the wa­ter sup­ply in­fra­struc­ture at WASA he an­nounced and fleshed out in the pages of the Busi­ness Guardian last Sep­tem­ber.

That $2.14b pro­gramme is ex­pect­ed to re­sult in the re­fur­bish­ment of wa­ter treat­ment plants at Gua­napo, Navet and North Oropouche and the con­struc­tion of new treat­ment plants at Golds­bor­ough in To­ba­go and Green Mead­ows in San­ta Cruz. Al­so planned is the con­struc­tion of wells through­out the coun­try. The log­ic of this pro­gramme of wa­ter sup­ply im­prove­ment is that it would give WASA the abil­i­ty to plan for the re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of wa­ter sup­plies to cus­tomers in the south and cen­tral of Trinidad.

These plans to im­prove and in­crease T&T’s wa­ter sup­ply are con­tin­gent on a fu­ture that is go­ing to be in­creas­ing­ly framed by the im­pact of cli­mate change on the avail­abil­i­ty of wa­ter.

Part of the Gov­ern­ment’s think­ing about the long-term sup­ply of wa­ter, how­ev­er, has to in­clude a sce­nario in which the dry sea­son plans for wa­ter pro­duc­tion and con­ser­va­tion ex­tend through­out the year in­stead of end­ing in June.