By Robert A Emmanuel
The Minister of Public Utilities, Melford Nicholas, continues to search for a solution to the 311-water fault reporting system which he has deemed inadequate after numerous complaints.
In May, Minister Nicholas, who is also the Cabinet spokesperson, revealed during a press briefing that he sought aid from Trinidad and Tobago Minister for Public Utilities, Marvin Gonzales, to assist in devising an alternative to the current system, similar to Trinidad and Tobago’s Water and Sewage Authority (WASA) app.
However, during last week’s Cabinet press briefing, the Minister indicated that this assistance hasn’t been forthcoming.
“We may have to issue an RFP [Request for Proposal] for our local developers to develop a fault reporting system, with a ticketing system for the opening and closing of a fault to allow us to be better responsive,” he explained.
Meanwhile, efforts to bolster the nation’s water production continues as drought conditions impact the nation’s natural water supply.
Minister Nicholas says that he hopes to achieve water production figures up to 15 million gallons a day by June 2024.
“Part of the issue why we cannot estimate demand is because we note that since Covid, the Tourism Authority, Ministry of Tourism have boosted longer hotel seasons than at any previous time in our history.
“And accordingly, when we have this increased number of persons at our hotels, they consume more water…Jolly Beach has been screaming at me for a while about getting more water; happily, they have started to upgrade their [reverse osmosis] plant and I imagine they are still going to need water from the public supply,” he explained.
The improvement in production is being done through the construction and upgrade of the public reverse osmosis plants, as well as partnerships with private water providers under a soon-to-be-finalised agreement.
Minister Nicholas said that if those improvements are made, the “focus would have to the next level of challenge which is the storage, for example, we had another instance where Barnacle Point at the Ivan Rodrigues Plant was inoperable, and it took 4-5 days [to repair] and we have 15-20 million gallons in storage, we could move that around and get it into those deficit areas.
“But we don’t have the storage capacity to deal with continual supply of water when one of the main units goes offline,” the Minister explained.
With the public declaration by the Leader of the Opposition Jamale Pringle to make water a nonpartisan issue, the Minister of Public Utilities will look to host an engagement between officials at the APUA and the Opposition to come up with the best strategies to address this vexing ailment in the country.
