Community tanks here to stay
Whatever the efforts being made by the Barbados Water Authority to ensure that Barbadians in water scarce parishes have a more reliable water supply in 2019, the recently replaced community water tanks will remain a feature of the Barbadian landscape.
General Manager of the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), Keithroy Halliday gave this assurance, stressing that the community tanks will be needed during the Hurricane Season and even in cases where burst mains or pipes lead to outages, despite the best efforts of the BWA, to put mitigation systems in place.
The community tanks were recently replaced and reactivated with the help of Corporate Barbados, following Innotech’s recent move to take control of a number of those tanks which were leased to the Water Authority, in its attempt to recover outstanding monies owed.
“The community tanks will always be needed, given the strategy that we have adopted. It is really for emergency events. You can never really stop a situation arising where you have burst mains or burst pipes and whenever we have the burst mains, while it is being fixed, the tanks will be in use. It doesn’t matter what parish you are in,” Halliday pointed out.
“Whenever we have a hurricane or storm event passing, we will always need the tanks. So the tanks will continue I think, to be a feature of our landscape,” he stressed.
Echoing comments made by BWA Board Chairman, Leodean Worrell that a plan is being put in place to ensure that by the end of 2019 residents in water scarce parishes such as St. Joseph, St. John, St. Andrew and St. Thomas will not have to experience water outages and poor water supply in their communities, Halliday maintained that the removal of the tanks will not be a part of this plan, given that they may still be needed, even when the BWA is able to establish better water supply for rural residents.
“What the Chairman would have been referring to principally, is the fact that we want make sure we have a regular, reliable supply of water to all residents in Barbados and that’s what the plan will speak to,” the General Manager said of a soon to be released plan, outlining how the BWA intends to improve on its service to residents in water scarce parishes.
It was during December last year, that Halliday noted that the BWA was working on various initiatives to ensure that apart from the tanks, residents in St. Joseph and other water scarce areas could be assured of having a constant supply of water.
He indicated at the time, “By the end of January, we would have had installed an additional containerised booster at Bushy Park, which will push water down and through the Bowmanston area, into this area of St. Joseph and when the Ionics Expansion Project is completed, we will be having additional water going through a booster being installed in Trents, up through the Lancaster area, through Golden Ridge, up to Castle Grant and again into this area.”
Pointing out that a lot of work has been taking place to ensure that the BWA solves the issues in water scare communities once and for all, Halliday said Barbadians can listen out this month to hear more about the BWA’s plans to improve on its services to affected residents. (RSM)