Jesse Ramdeo

Over 17,000 peo­ple across sev­en com­mu­ni­ties in east Trinidad are in line to ben­e­fit from the re­cent­ly com­plet­ed Trinci­ty Waste Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant.

At a recom­mis­sion­ing cer­e­mo­ny on Tues­day, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les said that the plant, lo­cat­ed off the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way, in­clud­ed new treat­ment sys­tems con­sist­ing of screen­ing, grit re­moval, bi­o­log­i­cal treat­ment and sec­ondary clar­i­fi­ca­tion among oth­er pu­rifi­ca­tion mea­sures.

Gon­za­les said the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) will be ex­pect­ed to aug­ment its dis­tri­b­u­tion sup­ply by tap­ping in­to the treat­ed waste­water the plant pro­duces.

“It has to be fur­ther treat­ed but not much again be­cause you would have seen the high qual­i­ty, so there is one more process to utilise to bring the wa­ter up to world health stan­dards and the pos­si­bil­i­ty ex­ists for it to be used in the do­mes­tic grid,” Gon­za­les said.

Be­fore the idea is flushed away en­tire­ly, it was one the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter said could pos­si­bly be a boost to the fi­nances of the weak­ened state com­pa­ny.

“It is a mat­ter of ed­u­cat­ing the pop­u­la­tion be­cause the whole idea of con­sum­ing treat­ed waste­water is some­thing you have to in­cre­men­tal­ly put in­to the com­mu­ni­ty,” he said.

Gon­za­les not­ed that wa­ter re-use will be an es­sen­tial ac­tiv­i­ty.

“We can now use this wa­ter to give sup­port to our farm­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty be­cause the farm­ers can now have ac­cess to it once the prop­er things are done. They can now have ac­cess to wa­ter to ir­ri­gate their crops through­out the en­tire year, we can now use the wa­ter to sup­port our in­dus­tries, we can al­so use it to recharge our aquifers so it’s a very im­pres­sive pro­gramme.”

The ex­pand­ed ca­pac­i­ty of the new plant will al­low for 2,385 new waste­water cus­tomers to be reg­u­larised.

It was al­so re­port­ed that COVID-19 had hin­dered works on the treat­ment plant, which took two years to com­plete at a cost of $60 mil­lion as a re­sult.

The funds for the project were ob­tained through a loan from the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank sev­en years ago. How­ev­er, it was al­most jeop­ar­dised af­ter the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment al­leged­ly breached the terms and con­di­tions of the loan.

Ac­cord­ing to Hous­ing and Ur­ban and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, swift ac­tion was need­ed to se­cure the loan.

“When we came in­to of­fice, we re­struc­tured the loan so that we can utilise the mon­ey or else the mon­ey would have been sent back,” Robin­son-Reg­is said.