Town Hall meeting addresses desalination plant expansion
ON Tuesday night, several residents came out to hear the proposed plans for the expansion of the Desalination Plant on Spring Garden and the potential impact that it could have on their homes or health.
The town hall meeting was held at the St. Stephen’s Church and is a part of the process before planning approval can be granted to expand the facility, which was established back in 2000.
The meeting, which was chaired by General Manager (Ag) of the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) Charles Leslie, was also attended by parliamentary representative of the area and Minister of Finance, Chris Sinckler. The Barbados Water Authority was represented by Alex Ifill, Steve Kern represented Ionics Freshwater Ltd, and Junior Jackson of SB Global (Barbados) Ltd were on hand to explain Barbados’ current water situation, the reverse osmosis process, the findings of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and steps to mitigate any environmental impact during and after construction.
One resident, Adelle Blackman, who lives on the ridge overlooking the site, expressed concern about the noise, the dust and any impact the drilling might have on her home. She was assured by Jackson of SB Global (Barbados) that an environmental impact assessment has been carried out on the area and steps have been put in place to ensure that residents are not impacted during construction phase or during the day-to-day operation of the plant.
Notably, he said that construction will only be conducted during working hours, dust screens will be used and the construction site will be wetted to ensure dust levels remain low. He assured that drilling would not have any vibrational impact on residents. The EIA also contemplated brackish water availability, which is used in the plant, brine disposal as well as chemical storage, usage and management.
Currently, the plant produces 30 000 cubic meters per day. With the expansion, the plant will be able to produce another 15 000. It will include six new abstraction wells to the well field, which is the area north of the present plant and adding one train of reverse osmosis membranes. Also included on the site will be a 1.22 million gallon capacity storage tank, three pumps that will be used to transfer the potable water from the storage tank to the BWA water system; an electrical transformer and an expanded electrical distribution room.
The expansion is intended to augment Barbados’ water supply and would be available to meet emergency water supply shortages resulting from future droughts, problems at any existing supply wells, and demand from future economic growth. Making a case for a need for reserve capacity, it was noted that some parts of the island experienced drought outages for a period of up to nine month. This was exacerbated by the fact that the drought severely reduced the available groundwater on which the island is heavily dependent.
Prior to this, the available groundwater resources were already almost entirely exploited with little or no reserve capacity.
It is noted that urgent need for reserve capacity was further demonstrated by the fact that if there had been no reserve capacity at the Spring Garden desalination plant, the whole of the West Coast would have suffered significant water outages during the recent drought event. The reserve capacity was fully utilised to augment the supply to the customers on the west coast as well as the northern parishes.
(JH)
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