SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Se­nior Re­porter

shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

De­creas­ing wa­ter lev­els at the Hol­lis Reser­voir will af­fect ap­prox­i­mate­ly 10,000 Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty’s (WASA) cus­tomers in parts of north east Trinidad from Arou­ca to Va­len­cia in the com­ing days.

Act­ing CEO Kelvin Ro­main, who spoke about the loom­ing wa­ter sup­ply prob­lems at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, warned that as soon as the coun­try en­ters the harsh 2024 dry sea­son, WASA might have to im­ple­ment harsh­er wa­ter re­stric­tions.

He blamed cli­mate change for the re­duc­tion in sup­ply, stat­ing that even though the coun­try is in the rainy sea­son, there has been lit­tle rain­fall to fill the Hol­lis Reser­voir which is cur­rent­ly at 43 per cent ca­pac­i­ty. The long-term av­er­age of the reser­voir for this time is usu­al­ly 73 per cent.

“As a re­sult of the low lev­els we have to do some cur­tail­ment, un­for­tu­nate­ly,” Ro­main said.

On Sat­ur­day, WASA ad­vised cus­tomers served by the Hol­lis Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant that wa­ter sup­ply sched­ules had been tem­porar­i­ly amend­ed to man­age op­er­a­tions at the reser­voir.

Pro­duc­tion at the plant is nor­mal­ly 8.4 mil­lion gal­lons a day. How­ev­er, WASA’s pro­duc­tion lev­el has been re­duced to 5.5 mil­lion gal­lons a day.

WASA ad­vised cus­tomers at the ex­trem­i­ties or el­e­vat­ed ar­eas of the Hol­lis dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem that they might ex­pe­ri­ence low pres­sures or no wa­ter.

“We have to cut back. That is a 2.9 mil­lion gal­lons per day deficit,” Ro­main said.

He added that WASA has to de­vel­op short, medi­um- and long-term strate­gies to deal with “hard-hit ar­eas” and has been tight­en­ing its leak dri­ve, man­ag­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion through bulk me­ters, sup­ply­ing cus­tomers with truck-borne wa­ter and will soon dig three wells to pro­vide an ad­di­tion­al one mil­lion gal­lons of wa­ter dai­ly.

“What you will see in the near fu­ture will be some mod­u­lar de­sali­na­tion plants through­out the coun­try,” he said.

Ro­main said ar­eas such as Ica­cos, Moru­ga and Ma­yaro will ben­e­fit from the plants which will be pow­ered by so­lar en­er­gy.

He said the Hol­lis Reser­voir ser­vices ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50,000 peo­ple di­rect­ly and in­di­rect­ly who will all be af­fect­ed by the de­creas­ing wa­ter lev­els.

“What we an­tic­i­pate is a fall out of about 10,000 or less cus­tomers who could be ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed,” he added.

In re­sponse to cus­tomer com­plaints that the truck-borne wa­ter sup­ply is slow, Ro­main said WASA is not wait­ing for cus­tomers to call their hot­line cen­tre but has been dis­trib­ut­ing wa­ter to those in need.

“We have been fill­ing peo­ple’s tanks,” he in­sist­ed.

How­ev­er, he said some cus­tomers are not prac­tic­ing wa­ter con­ser­va­tion and WASA is ac­tive­ly look­ing for peo­ple who abuse the es­sen­tial com­mod­i­ty.

“Trust me, you will see some­thing in the near fu­ture about that. We don’t have any re­stric­tions right now but based on the de­vel­op­ments and what we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing right now, we ex­pect to. We are ap­proach­ing a dry sea­son. We ex­pect the dry sea­son to be a bit harsh, so re­stric­tions are most like­ly im­mi­nent,” he said.

Asked if WASA is con­sid­er­ing stiffer fines for vi­o­la­tors, Ro­main said for that to be done laws will have to be re­vised.

“The cur­rent fine un­der the Wa­ter and Sewage Act is $75 and be­cause house­holds are not me­tered, peo­ple tend to use more wa­ter,” he said.

Ro­main said while many cus­tomers have been pay­ing their WASA bills, the util­i­ty is owed $600 mil­lion in ar­rears by delin­quent res­i­den­tial cus­tomers.

“We are get­ting some cus­tomers to pay but the prob­lem is peo­ple jus­ti­fy their po­si­tion be­cause they have an in­con­sis­tent sup­ply or they don’t have a sup­ply at all,” he said.

The WASA CEO de­scribed yes­ter­day’s wa­ter protests by Granville and Ce­dros res­i­dents as “un­for­tu­nate” but said he em­pathis­es “with any cus­tomer who is irate about not re­ceiv­ing a sup­ply.”

“We were ac­tu­al­ly do­ing some re­source man­age­ment,” he said. “We were shift­ing re­sources to hard­er hit ar­eas like Ica­cos. The Granville area, I be­lieve Syfoo Trace … they re­ceive a 24/7 sup­ply. As of Wednes­day gone we would have cut back the sup­ply so we could send more wa­ter to Ica­cos.”