Barbados Water Authority (BWA) workers are pleading with the public to be more patient and less abusive as they go about repairing burst mains and broken pipes.The call came from a number of workmen who turned up to fix a major burst in St Peter which they had only mended a few days earlier.
While a DAILY NATION team was photographing a stream of water from the rupture in Farm Road just after noon yesterday, a BWA crew from the Jerusalem depot in Maynards, St Peter, drove in with the men shouting: “All right, we here to fix it!”
They reported that last Saturday they spent more than five hours effecting repairs there, and speculated that heavy-duty traffic might have contributed to yesterday’s damage which, they said, was reported after 11 a.m.
The men, who declined to give their names as they were not authorised to speak to the Press, lamented the “cussing” they often received at the hands of upset residents in various districts.
“People get vex when we have to turn off the water,” said one crew member in his 30s, “but we can’t go around to every single house to say the water will be off”.
He conceded that while their public relations personnel might be able to help in this regard, that was not always feasible on a day of many calls, some spontaneous. He said that on average they attended to three to four burst mains a day.
A colleague, in his 50s, chimed in that many people failed to appreciate the tough conditions under which they worked and the sacrifices they made.
The men said that sometimes when they were digging they encountered electricity or gas lines. This resulted in further delays as they had to wait on the other utility companies before they could proceed.
“Sometimes we have to wait on equipment. We may have about four backhoes [at our depot], but sometimes three may be down and we have lengthy delays,” the older man said, adding that sometimes they would resort to manual digging where possible.
“We are on a 24-hour call, and people don’t see that. The workers are out here trying their best, [so] the public must try to be more understanding,” he stressed.
The men said that some jobs could take from two hours to “well into the night”. They added that while people might complain of “leaking cocks”, their first priority was plugging the broken mains. (BW)
