KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

There are still some cus­tomers in cen­tral and south Trinidad who re­main with­out a wa­ter sup­ply. How­ev­er, the De­sali­na­tion Com­pa­ny of T&T (De­sal­cott) is re­mov­ing it­self from blame.

De­sal­cott man­ag­ing di­rec­tor John Thomp­son said yes­ter­day that pro­duc­tion is back up to max­i­mum ca­pac­i­ty af­ter elec­tri­cal is­sues on Sat­ur­day af­fect­ed thou­sands of cus­tomers served by the Point Lisas plant.

While ad­mit­ting the com­pa­ny ex­pe­ri­enced a se­ries of mi­nor and ma­jor elec­tri­cal is­sues last week­end, Thomp­son said those prob­lems have since been rec­ti­fied.

How­ev­er, when asked why some cus­tomers were still with­out wa­ter, Thomp­son said, “We on­ly de­liv­er the wa­ter to WASA. They dis­trib­ute it, so you will have to ask them that.”

He added, “We’ve com­plet­ed the re­pairs and we had to ramp up in­to WASA’s sys­tem. It’s their re­quire­ments and that’s been done, and we should be up to full ca­pac­i­ty about now.”

At­tempts to con­tact WASA’s act­ing CEO Kelvin Ro­main were fu­tile yes­ter­day. How­ev­er, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les said cus­tomers in el­e­vat­ed ar­eas re­mained with­out wa­ter but that will not be for much longer.

“Nor­mal­ly, in a dis­rup­tion of that na­ture, cus­tomers on the el­e­vat­ed points will take a lit­tle longer be­cause for they to get wa­ter, there must be suf­fi­cient pres­sure on the line at the low­est ar­eas in or­der to al­low the wa­ter to build to cus­tomers at the el­e­va­tion.

“That’s why you’ll hear cus­tomers say­ing, ‘My neigh­bour right down the road get­ting wa­ter but we haven’t re­ceived wa­ter’. And that is so in a lot of cas­es be­cause the wa­ter must re­main in some of those ar­eas for a long pe­ri­od of time in or­der for the pres­sure to build to the cus­tomers on the up­per end,” he ex­plained.

“Now that the sys­tem is nor­mal­is­ing, what is hap­pen­ing is that more pres­sure is go­ing to be build­ing on the net­work, so the 20 to 30 per­cent now will start see­ing an in­cre­men­tal re­turn to a nor­mal wa­ter pres­sure and wa­ter sup­ply.”

Asked why boost­er sta­tions are not be­ing used to as­sist cus­tomers in el­e­vat­ed ar­eas, Gon­za­les said while boost­ers have ad­van­tages, those used in the past cre­at­ed a lot of leaks and burst pipes be­cause of the strong pres­sures.