The dry sea­son has led to the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) mak­ing fur­ther ad­just­ments to its wa­ter sup­ply sched­ules be­cause of a re­duc­tion in the pro­duc­tion of mil­lions of gal­lons of wa­ter.

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, WASA ex­plained that dry weath­er and a lack of rain­fall led to a ten per cent pro­duc­tion short­fall in wa­ter sup­ply. WASA said this loss in pro­duc­tion ac­counts for near­ly 25 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter per day. 

It means that while WASA has been mak­ing ad­just­ments through­out the 2024 dry sea­son, such as along the trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion pipeline net­works, amend­ed sched­ules, the in­tro­duc­tion of new ground­wa­ter sources in some ar­eas, and ex­pand­ed wa­ter truck­ing ser­vice, some places across the coun­try will soon see even less wa­ter in their taps.

WASA said the new sched­ule changes were pri­mar­i­ly due to a pro­duc­tion short­fall from 20 to 17 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter per day at the North Oropouche Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant which sup­plies north­east­ern Trinidad and the Navet Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant, which saw a drop in pro­duc­tion from 19 to 16 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter per day. That plant sup­plies sev­er­al parts of cen­tral and south­east­ern Trinidad.

WASA al­so said a com­bined pro­duc­tion re­duc­tion from 4.6 to 2.7 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter per day at the Cour­land, Rich­mond, Kings Bay and Hills­bor­ough West wa­ter treat­ment plants, means To­ba­go has not been left un­scathed.

The T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice has stat­ed that most of Trinidad re­ceived be­low-nor­mal rain­fall dur­ing the months of Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary and March. Pi­ar­co’s month­ly to­tals were 48.1 mm, 3.5 mm and 17.0 mm. To­ba­go re­ceived be­low-nor­mal rain­fall dur­ing Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary with month­ly to­tals of 49.0 mm and 3.9 mm.

WASA said in its state­ment, “As the coun­try con­tin­ues to cope with the ef­fects of the harsh con­di­tions as­so­ci­at­ed with the 2024 dry sea­son, the au­thor­i­ty has been tak­ing the nec­es­sary steps to pru­dent­ly man­age the coun­try’s avail­able wa­ter re­sources.”

The new wa­ter sup­ply sched­ules are on WASA’s web­site and so­cial me­dia pages.