Last week in the Busi­ness Guardian, Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, Mar­vin Gon­za­les out­lined an am­bi­tious pro­gramme of work to be un­der­tak­en by his Min­istry and Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), which would in­clude the re­fur­bish­ment and up­grade of ex­ist­ing wa­ter treat­ment plants at Gua­napo, Navet and North Oropouche.

The projects al­so in­clude new wa­ter treat­ment plants in Golds­bor­ough in To­ba­go and Green Mead­ows in San­ta Cruz and new wells, with as­so­ci­at­ed pipelines, pro­posed for the Clarke Road area in Pe­nal and for Tuck­er Val­ley in Ch­aguara­mas.

The in­fra­struc­tur­al up­grade of the wa­ter sup­ply in T&T is be­ing fund­ed by a US$80 mil­lion ($544 mil­lion) loan from the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB). That loan is the first tranche of a US$315 mil­lion ($2.14 bil­lion) con­di­tion­al cred­it line from the IDB.

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter, Mar­vin Gon­za­les said when the IDB-fund­ed projects are com­plet­ed by the end of next year, he ex­pects T&T to be less de­pen­dent on wa­ter from the de­sali­na­tion plant on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate.

“Au­to­mat­i­cal­ly, the coun­try will not be that re­liant on De­sal­cott. Even though there is a take-or-pay con­tract to 2030 or 2035, as the case may be, the ad­di­tion­al vol­umes of wa­ter that we are go­ing to be pro­duc­ing would make the coun­try less de­pen­dent on de­sali­nat­ed wa­ter. So any dis­rup­tion of the De­sal­cott plant would not have the kind of im­pact that it is hav­ing on our do­mes­tic cus­tomers,” said Gon­za­les.

He said De­sal­cott now pro­duces about 40 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter a day. Of that amount, 15 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter go to the plants at Point Lisas and 25 mil­lion gal­lons go to do­mes­tic cus­tomers.

Once the in­fra­struc­tur­al projects are com­plet­ed, WASA’s con­tract with De­sal­cott would al­low the util­i­ty to re­dis­trib­ute wa­ter to ar­eas that are cur­rent­ly be­ing un­der­served. This would al­low the util­i­ty to pro­vide more days of wa­ter to res­i­dents who may be re­ceiv­ing wa­ter one or two days of the week.

The projects would al­so al­low WASA to store wa­ter in tanks, which the min­is­ter says is some­thing that is sad­ly lack­ing in the lo­cal wa­ter sec­tor.

“So if there is a dis­rup­tion at the Ca­roni Are­na Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant now, im­me­di­ate­ly the cus­tomers feel the im­pact be­cause wa­ter does not go in­to a stor­age fa­cil­i­ty where it can main­tain sup­ply for a day or two,” Gon­za­les said, adding the Min­istry has plans to re­fur­bish a five-mil­lion gal­lon stor­age tank at Mount Hope and the 10 mil­lion gal­lon tank at Pic­ton in Laven­tille.

He said once the min­istry gets a good al­lo­ca­tion in next Mon­day’s 2024 bud­get, it in­tends to con­struct a small, mod­u­lar wa­ter treat­ment plant in Ravine Sable in Cen­tral Trinidad.

“There is a huge lake of wa­ter (ac­quifer) that the Wa­ter Re­source Agency and the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T con­duct­ed hy­dro­log­i­cal re­search on and they ad­vised me that we can ex­tract ap­prox­i­mate­ly two mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter per day there,” said Gon­za­les.