BWA working on resolving issues

Though the situation is currently under control, efforts by the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) to stabilise the pumping situation at its Hampton station, has intensified over the last week.

This promise came from the Director of Engineering at the BWA, Charles Leslie, as he gave an update to press yesterday about the work that has been carried out so far at the southern pumping station, after equipment was damaged due to the two-day blackout the country experienced the previous week.

“The electricity interruptions both from the blackout and then afterwards from the connection we had at the Hampton facility, knocked out all of our variable-frequency drives and our guys had to troubleshoot them,” he began.

These variable-frequency drives (VFD) act as the brains for these pumps as they control frequency and voltage of the power supply being delivered at any given point in time. The island wide blackout wreaked havoc on these systems to such an extent, that normal service to the areas which receive water from the Hampton plant, still continues to be affected.

“We had to cannibalise some of our spare equipment in order to do the repairs at the site. We also had to rebuild pumps, and we also had issues with burnt cables. The station is operational now, and producing the six million gallons it normally does, but that particular well normally has a redundancy, which we do not have at this time,” he said.

BWA customers receives 50 percent of their water supply from water pumped between the Belle and Hampton stations, so having the latter back online to full capacity has been a matter of urgency for the workers. To get the VFDs back up and running to full system specifications, the BWA has contacted the drive manufacturer, and they have promised to have their technician arrive on island by at least Friday or Saturday of this week from a nearby service centre in Panama.

“We are currently making plans for the technician from that service center to be here in Barbados with some additional parts, to conduct the replacement of some of those parts in the drives that we have not been able to restore,” Leslie indicated.

Minister of Energy and Water Resources, Wilfred Abrahams, acknowledged the frustrations many Barbadians have expressed over the last week with respect to the uncertainty surround the water supply, but stressed that because of the nature of areas the Hamptons services, the unfortunate circumstances that led to the outages simply could not have been avoided with the present state of the plant.

“Nowhere in our history, have we ever had a situation where ten of our pumps were disabled at the same time. I understand people are frustrated, and were real unhappy over the last ten days but that was not normal – ten days for us. Despite how it looks, the engineers and the support staff at the BWA have been working around the clock to fix it,” Abrahams explained.