General Manager of the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), Keithroy Halliday.
Communities across Barbados experiencing water outages should be getting some relief shortly.
General Manager of the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), Keithroy Halliday gave this assurance to the Standing Finance Committee during the Appropriation Bill and Estimate 2019.
He explained that outages have been attributed to mainly to three factors:
“We have had an increased number of bursts; weather issues resulted in an increase in demand as the dry season comes upon us and particularly in light of the drought that is now ahead of us; and there were frequent disruptions in pumping as a result of electrical outages and these disruptions have actually damaged quite a number of pumping systems”.
Halliday said that while BWA is continuing to install community tanks and deploy water tankers, work is progressing with several booster stations.
“We will be completing the installation of a booster station in Bushy Park and that station will push an extra 250 million gallons per day into the Bowmanston, Golden Ridge distribution system, which will in turn feed the Castle Grant system and that will supply additional water into the St. Andrew and St. Joseph areas in particular.”
He further revealed that with the expansion of the Desalination Plant at Springer Garden, the BWA would be installing another booster station.
“The expansion at Spring Garden will put into our distribution system another 15 million gallons per day, and that will be pushed to the Lazaretto to Carlton up into the Trents and that booster station will then serve to push a combined extra one million gallons of water per day into three main areas – St. Andrew, St. Joseph and St. Thomas,” he explained, adding that areas such as Redman’s Village, Welches and surrounding districts will see that the water outages will mitigate more and more.
“We recognise the challenges and we are rushing as fast as we can to get these booster stations in effect”.