A WHOPPING $48 961 598 in outstanding bill payments from customers.
That’s the figure found on a memo placed on Minister of Agriculture and Water Resource Management Dr. David Estwick’s desk yesterday. He shared the information with the media as he outlined some of the challenges facing the Barbados Water Authority when asked to quantify the losses incurred as a result of illegal connections in Barbados.
While not having that figure to hand, he explained that non-revenue water, otherwise known as physical losses, are separated into two categories, physical and commercial. He noted that the Smart Meter Project is seeking to address the commercial side.
While physical losses include the illegal connections, he noted that these losses go a lot further. “The physical losses would also be mains that are leaking that we don’t know anything about. And because we have 100-year-old mains in Barbados and some of them massive mains, unless you have a pressure and flow meter how do you know they are leaking?”
“So we know that the physical losses are between 40 and 60 per cent. That’s massive. If you pump 100 per cent water in the mains 40 to 60 are going back into the ground. And that has nothing to do with the illegal connections that you have onto the system,” he stressed.
He noted that this was confirmed by Water Management Caribbean during a past pilot project.
“The challenge that you have is that if you go back into an old main system and it is 15 miles long, if you only have money to change five or ten miles, you burst the other old mains down the line because it can’t take the sudden increase in pressure which is the problem. So managing a utility like this is extremely difficult. I don’t think Barbadians appreciate or understand the challenges which we face,” he told the media.
He said the BWA will be further challenged now that it is being brought under the Fair Trading Commission, which is setting rules and regulations of services some of which are punitive in nature. “In order to do that your internal infrastructure and capacity has to be on the international standard and we are not there yet. We are struggling to get there. All we can do is try our best to upgrade with what funds we have and utilise those optimally,” he said.