The United Progressive Party (UPP) said the Gaston Browne administration’s poor management of resources has created the water crisis which the country is currently enduring.
“At present, half the country is out of water for 72 hours on account of ‘emergency maintenance’ being undertaken at the Crabbs water plant,” the UPP said in a release.
The UPP Leader Harold Lovell said that Crabbs and all the reverse osmosis plants on Antigua have not been producing at capacity, and this is largely due to inadequate maintenance of equipment and the shortage of supplies.
Lovell said the Crabbs plant is producing only 2 million gallons of water per day, which is about half of its 2016 output, while the Camp Blizard plant is down to 300,000 gallons from the 600,000 it once produced daily.
The plant at Shell Beach and the two at Ffryes have dropped 700,000 and 250,000 daily gallons, respectively, he said, adding that Pigeon Point’s output has been reduced by 100,000 gallons a day.
Lovell also chided the government for its failure to commission two UPP-installed storage tanks, at Patterson’s and Buckleys, and to connect another tank located at Collins, while residents and businesses are suffering.
He also noted that while the government is preparing to spend US $14 million on another reverse-osmosis plant — without deploying these three tanks with a collective storage capacity of more than one million gallons — the wasting of water continues.
Lovell also rejected as a “big lie” the notion that up to 40 percent of the water produced is lost to leakage, since the evidence of this would be obvious all around the country, he said.