Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

Act­ing CEO of the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) Kelvin Ro­main is promis­ing a wa­ter sup­ply to all cus­tomers af­fect­ed by the nine-day shut­down of the Point Lisas De­sali­na­tion Plant. He gave the as­sur­ance dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the De­sal­cott plant at the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate yes­ter­day.

The De­sal­cott shut­down, which start­ed yes­ter­day, is to fa­cil­i­tate main­te­nance and re­pairs to the plant.

Ro­main ex­plained that De­sal­cott is con­tract­ed to sup­ply WASA with 40 mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter a day, of which 12 to 15 mil­lion gal­lons go to the in­dus­tri­al es­tate and the re­main­der to its dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work for cus­tomers in south Trinidad.

He said while WASA will be neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by the shut­down, they plan to sup­ple­ment with sup­ply from the Ca­roni and Navet Wa­ter Treat­ment Plants and the De­sali­na­tion plant in Point Fortin.

“What I want to as­sure our cus­tomers of is that we would have a sched­ule in place to en­sure busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity, mean­ing that be­cause of the deficit, we would have to add ad­di­tion­al sup­ply, and we would have cus­tomers who would have ex­pe­ri­ence 24/7 sup­ply and 24/5 sup­ply with a re­duce amount of sup­ply, but a con­sis­tent sup­ply dur­ing the week, al­beit at in­ter­mit­tent days and that would fa­cil­i­tate oth­er cus­tomers on the sys­tem who would have reeled from the deficit to get a sup­ply,” he ex­plained.

Ro­main said cus­tomers who on­ly re­ceive truck borne wa­ter will con­tin­ue to re­ceive a sup­ply and truck-borne wa­ter will be avail­able to oth­er cus­tomers up­on re­quest.

“I want to as­sure our cus­tomers that dur­ing this pe­ri­od we ex­pect that every­one would re­ceive a sup­ply, al­beit through some sched­ules,” he said.

On the is­sue of staff cuts dur­ing the re­struc­tur­ing of WASA, Ro­main said his job might al­so be on the chop­ping block.

De­sal­cott man­ag­ing di­rec­tor John Thomp­son ex­plained that the plant has to shut down once a year for main­te­nance to en­sure it is re­li­able dur­ing the dry sea­son but they would try to com­plete the work ahead of sched­ule.

Thomp­son said cli­mate change and al­gae posed chal­lenges, but De­sal­cott con­tin­ues to pro­vide a sup­ply “very close to its con­trac­tu­al agree­ment”. He said the short­fall could be be­tween half and five per cent.

While Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les has spo­ken about re­duc­ing WASA’s re­liance on De­sal­cott, Thomp­son said they are com­mit­ted to con­tin­ue sup­ply­ing WASA for the fore­see­able fu­ture.

“We are al­so un­der­tak­ing a project to put in a new by­pass prod­uct tank which will en­able us to keep shut­downs short in the fu­ture. Main­te­nance of the prod­uct tank is a lengthy op­er­a­tion, tak­ing at least ten days, but once we put this by­pass tank in, we will do it with­out tak­ing the plant of­fline,” he said.

There are no wa­ter re­stric­tions in place, but WASA’s Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er Daniel Plen­ty en­cour­aged cus­tomers to con­serve wa­ter dur­ing the shut­down and con­tact the util­i­ty’s on­line cus­tomer ser­vice por­tal and its WASA ser­vices app.