Not political!

THE Minister responsible for Water Resource Management, Dr. David Estwick, is adamant that water should not be made a political issue.

 

Speaking to the media yesterday morning, just two days after several residents of St. Joseph led a protest outside the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) to express their frustration about the prolonged water outages that have been affecting them and called for his resignation, Dr. Estwick contended that blaming him personally for the water woes was a far stretch as he has no control over rainfall, which has been quite low in recent times. He made the point as he noted that the average rainfall per year has been in the region of 55 inches, with last year dropping as low as 31 inches.

 

“The issue is to understand the facts and not play politics with water. Water is not a political issue, water is a life and death issue and my challenge is to fix an old infrastructure that should have been fixed, and in due time I will be going to St. Joseph; I’m going to launch two new mains… That’s a new main from Golden Ridge to Castle Grant under the IDB Programme and the second one from Sweet Vale to Castle Grant, that should have been fixed and done before,” he said.

 

Dr. Estwick added, “But I’m not going to get into that because if a man does not have water, he has a right to protest. But you do not use the protestation politically, because if you got 31 inches last year, which is the lowest rainfall in 76 years, where is the Barbados Water Authority going to get the water from?”

 

Reiterating that the issue is one of low rainfall and an ageing infrastructure, he noted that the country’s rainfall average barely gives the BWA enough to extract the 44 million gallons of water that it takes per day. 

He said that quantity of water has been extracted per day since 1998, but he lamented that it was more than what the “rain was putting in the ground”.

 

“So how can you blame me or the Water Authority for that? We don’t bring politics into those matters. That is the reason why I congratulate former Prime Minister Owen Arthur, because after the Prime Minister got the information on the water management and water loss study, he understood he had to try to augment the water supply, so he built one desal plant,” he noted.

 

Estwick said that at that time more than one desal plant should have been built, and efforts should have been made to upgrade the mains and reservoirs.    

 

“That never happened, so we still have an infrastructure that is a hundred years old and crumbling, at the same time that we have a significant reduction in rainfall,” he stated.

 

Estwick said that his Ministry and the BWA are addressing the challenges, with one of the primary solutions being the construction of additional desalination plants. He noted that they have recently commissioned a temporary plant at The Hope, St. Lucy and are expected to have a second temporary plant commissioned in Trents, St. James in November. He made the disclosure while noting that there are plans to construct two large permanent desal plants, which should help push the daily capacity to as much as 65 million gallons. (JRT)