MORE WATER WOES AFTER EXPLOSION AT CRABB’S

For the second consecutive day, the majority of households and businesses on the island will be without water, and the head of the Water Business Unit at Antigua Public Utilities Authority (APUA) Ivan Rodrigues is asking residents to “please bear with APUA”.
This, after an electrical problem and subsequent explosion at the Crabb’s Reverse Osmosis Plant on Sunday evening resulted in a shutdown of the water supply to about 60 per cent of the island.
“Because we get almost all of our water now from Crabb’s, it is affecting almost the entire island except for areas like English Harbour or Ffryes beach where they have their own desalination plant, so it will affect about 60 per cent of our consumers,” Rodrigues said.
“Bear with us as we work to get things back to normal and we are hoping to have things back to normal by 4 [today]. This was not a problem with the plant, it was an electrical fault on the system that affected the supply of power to the plant.
“The challenge we were facing affected Potworks, Parham and Crabb’s Peninsula — that whole area. When they would have done the initial maintenance, there was a low voltage affecting Potworks and the phase out affecting Crabb’s.”
Rodrigues said while the electrical problem was addressed yesterday and the water was being pumped into the pipelines, “it will take a while to get the tanks to a suitable level and getting water back to the public”.
He said this process would take approximately 48 hours; in other words, water will not be restored to the affected communities before late this afternoon, since the problem started late Sunday.
The APUA official explained that the electrical problem was due to what he called a “phase out” which occurs for varying reasons.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)