PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty said yes­ter­day, it has suf­fered a 40 mil­lion gal­lon dai­ly short­fall, as a re­sult of the se­vere dry sea­son.

WASA said it has start­ed re­dis­tri­b­u­tion ef­forts to help al­le­vi­ate wa­ter short­ages across the coun­try.

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Al­lan Poon King said the util­i­ty had looked to the use of ground­wa­ter wells and col­lab­o­ra­tions with de­sali­na­tion plants to ad­dress some of the short­ages.

Speak­ing dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at WASA’s St Joseph head of­fice, Poon King warned how­ev­er, that the sup­ply re­dis­tri­b­u­tion to Pe­nal and Debe, where there are thou­sands of com­plaints, would con­tin­ue to be chal­lenge.

“The com­mu­ni­ties in South Trinidad that we’ve been get­ting com­plaints from re­cent­ly would have been Debe and Pe­nal. We do have, well Debe is sup­plied by our Ca­roni Treat­ment Plant and there is no po­ten­tial for ground­wa­ter in that par­tic­u­lar area. Pe­nal, we do have a small wa­ter treat­ment plant that does utilise wells but the ma­jor­i­ty of our wa­ter re­sources are con­cen­trat­ed in North Trinidad,” he said.

“The par­tic­u­lar ar­eas, Cen­tral Trinidad as well we do have two plants and we do have main­te­nance work that will be done on those wells, we have three well plants at Las Lo­mas, Freeport and Carlsen Field they are all sup­ple­ment­ed by the Ca­roni Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant. So I would say the ma­jor­i­ty of the sources are ex­ter­nal to Cen­tral and South Trinidad, all the large wa­ter sources so that is why we have to trans­port wa­ter to Cen­tral and South.”

Poon King said 40 mil­lion gal­lon short­fall was equiv­a­lent to the dai­ly out­put of the Point Lisas De­sali­na­tion plant alone.

He ex­plained that Ca­roni Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant, which was re­spon­si­ble for the wa­ter sent to Pe­nal/Debe and oth­er ar­eas in south-west Trinidad is now pro­duc­ing 40 mil­lion gal­lons dai­ly as op­posed to its usu­al through­put of 75 mil­lion.

Poon King al­so ad­mit­ted that the lack of me­ter­ing around the coun­try made it dif­fi­cult to mon­i­tor if wa­ter us­age had in­creased or de­clined due to stay-at-home mea­sures.

“We don’t have the num­ber of me­tres we would like to have in­stalled, so to de­fin­i­tive­ly say it’s gone up or gone down, I can’t say at this time. What we can say is the us­age pat­tern would have change and so that with the stay at home in place, the sys­tem is not, the de­mand on the sys­tem is not the same as it was be­fore,” he said, how­ev­er, ex­plained that me­ter­ing re­mained in WASA’s plans.

“We are pro­gress­ing, get­ting what we re­fer to as bulk me­ters which would give da­ta of flows in our net­work so that is be­ing pro­gressed at this time.”

For­mer Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Robert Le Hunte re­signed from the post two weeks ago, af­ter his plans for a re­haul of WASA with a fo­cus on a me­ter­ing sys­tem were re­port­ed shut down in Cab­i­net.