The levels in reservoirs across the country have been at approximately 90 per cent for the past few weeks but that makes no difference to the hundreds of households nationwide suffering for days —in some cases weeks—without a supply from the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA).
This is adding insult to the injury for consumers, a downgrade from the notoriously unreliable scheduled supply of water provided for just a few hours one or two days a week in most parts of the country.
So continues the sorry tale of WASA, the most dysfunctional of the country’s public utilities which, even on the cusp of a radical restructuring exercise, continues to waste funds and water at an alarming rate.
Over the past few days, the Guardian Media newsroom has been swamped with calls and emails from frustrated consumers about the lack of either a pipe- or truck-borne supply. The complaints have been pouring in from areas as diverse as Fondes Amandes in St Ann’s to parts of Penal, which experienced severe flooding just a few days ago.
A question about water availability posted on our social media platforms yesterday drew even more complaints of dry taps, leaking water lines and an increasingly dysfunctional water truck service.
The widening gap between demand and supply of this essential resource is believed to be driven primarily by the fact that at least 60 million gallons is lost every day through WASA’s leaking, outdated pipeline infrastructure. But it gets worse.
Every day, consumers experience the reality of all that was outlined in the December 2020 Cabinet Subcommittee Report on WASA. The utility continues to live up to its reputation as an “unwieldy, overstaffed, unproductive, unresponsive organisation that has deteriorated and is no longer efficiently serving the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago.”
For WASA, 2020 is already an annus horribilis with two drastic overhauls of executive management—the installation of a team headed by Dr Lennox Sealy in February, then its replacement last month by another interim executive management team led by Sherland Sheppard.
Neither of these shake-ups has improved the pace of the long-promised WASA transformation exercise. The emergence of a “technology-driven, customer-focused and commercially viable” water company seems to still be a long way off.
Of major concern is the fact that the country’s water supply situation is even worse than it was at the start of the year—before all those managerial changes—as more and more communities are experiencing long periods without a supply.
And it couldn’t be happening at a worse time, when T&T is in the throes of a COVID-19 pandemic where frequent sanitisation is among the essential public health protocols. Consider how the risks to the population increase when entire communities are left waterless for weeks.
So far, there has been a deafening silence from WASA’s current management on this latest water crisis. This is an unacceptable situation for an entity that has long outlived its usefulness.