By Tahna Weston
The Antigua Public Utilities Authority (APUA) said it is working earnestly to restore pipe-borne water to a number of areas, as members of the public have taken to social media to express their frustration over the lack of the commodity.
Some of the grievances were expressed under a Facebook post written by the MP for St Mary’s South Kelvin Simon, who complained that Thursday, August 15 marked six days since West Palm Beach in Bolans had been without water.
Residents complained about being without the precious commodity for 10 days while others from Freemans Village, Grays Farm and Jennings revealed that they have been without water for five days.
Contacted for a response about the water situation, Collin Browne, the acting corporate communications officer at APUA, said the Crabb’s Reverse Osmosis Plant had an issue and therefore some areas to include Freemans Village which are serviced by that plant had water woes.
“So [last week] Thursday [August 8] the Crabb’s station had an issue, a broken pipeline on the premises that needed to be repaired. That repair would have caused the plant to shut down; they had to shut it down to make that repair … that repair took a few days.
“And there were seemingly two other issues that happened after that would have caused that plant to be shut down in order for repair,” Browne said.
However, he said that the Crabb’s plant is back up and would have been able to start distributing water to the affected areas from Thursday night into Friday, adding that it normally takes one to three days for full pressurization of the system to take place.
This Reverse Osmosis plant is one of the main water distribution catchments that serves communities from the eastern, northern, and central parts of the island, in addition to certain areas of St John’s to include Upper Gambles, Government House, the Village Walk area and Clare Hall.
“Before the storm we usually would suspend distribution to get the production tanks filled up so they are ready for after the storm passes, because we know there is the issue of turbidity once the storm is there and the seas are rough.
“We can’t draw water from the ocean when it’s stirred up. So we would fill the production tanks so that after the storm we’d be able to distribute some water from out of the production tanks while we cannot pull from the sea,” Browne said.
The acting corporate communications officer said in addition to the Crabb’s plant being brought back online, the Fort James and the Ivan Rodrigues plants should also be operational as well.
Speaking specifically to the Bolans community, which is serviced by the Ffreys RO plant, Browne said before the passage of Tropical Storm Ernesto on August 13, one of the plant’s several units went down, and this resulted in the entire area that the plant generally serves not being operational at the same time.
He said that APUA opted in this case to have an alternating of water distribution in the area.
“There are two main areas that they alternate between so that alternation period may be anywhere from between 24 to about 48 hours, so Bolans, Jennings and so forth would be serviced for a day or two and then switched over to Old Road and those areas.
“Tuesday, we had the storm so based on the fact of the rough seas and also possible outages we would not have been producing water for Tuesday, and in terms to turbidity the seas would still being rough Wednesday and Thursday,” Browne noted.
Residents are being promised that water will be supplied from an alternate source within the next day or two, but Browne said in the worst-case scenario, the sea could still be rough, which would cause the RO plant to remain offline until next Tuesday, but he is hoping that the plant will be back up and running in the shortest possible time.
He further advised residents that since water is an important commodity, it is prudent to keep containers filled with water to last for up to seven days prior to a weather system.
He added that it is also important for households to have some sort of permanent water catchments at their homes since not having the commodity can be very stressful.
