A national crisis. That is how the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) is characterising the constant sewage overflows plaguing the tourist stretch of the South Coast.
However, new BWA general manager Keithroy Halliday, his manager of the Waste Water Recovery Programme, Patricia Inniss, and director of engineering Charles Leslie are assuring the public they are working assiduously to correct the problems. In fact, the BWA has joined with a number of stakeholders, including the Ministries of Tourism and Health, to find a solution to the problem.
In addition, technical expertise is due in the island this week to effect a bypass of a blockage in the system which has been causing the backups and overflows.
“In Barbados, we have never dealt with a situation like this before,” Leslie admitted yesterday.
As they spoke, motorists and pedestrians were still contending with sewage overflows in the area of the Lanterns Mall, Hastings, although not on the scale of recent weeks.
Halliday, Inniss and Leslie, along with Acting Chief Medical Officer Kenneth George, were speaking at a Press conference at the South Coast Sewage Treatment Plant in St Lawrence yesterday.
“The BWA and the various ministries have been very sensitive that we are at the start of the tourist season,” Halliday said.
“We have been very sensitive really to the fact that we are possibly at the start of a bumper season, given what has happened through the Caribbean in terms of various hurricanes and the various disasters that have affected our area; and that Barbados was on the precipice of being able to do very well over the next several months.”
While the BWA thought it had the situation under control earlier this year, Halliday said the discovery of a blockage in the line, along with other issues that subsequently surfaced, meant the “particular issue has reached a proportion where several weeks ago it had escalated to the national level.
“We are characterising this is as a national crisis,” he declared.
“At this particular juncture all of us have joined hands forcefully as a national crisis because it is at a national level, affecting the national public and we are going to push as much as we can.”
He admitted the BWA must take some heat for “not necessarily communicating consistently” with the public. As a result, he said there was the impression that “we have not been treating or we are not aware of the significance of this”.
But the general manager stressed that the BWA and Inniss had been constant putting information in the public domain and had made a commitment to communicating on a weekly basis.
“Perhaps part of the challenge is we have not necessarily explained all of the issues behind the press releases or the communications that we have been putting forward,” he admitted.
Halliday said the South Coast Treatment Plant has been plagued by a series of minor blockages, a series of breakdowns and a series of pump failures.
The sewage system, he added, was “challenged for capacity”.
“It is clearly accepted or understood that we need to do a major overhaul or a significant upgrade to the South Coast Sewage Treatment Plant and subsequently we will also be tackling the Bridgetown,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Leslie said the BWA had been in contact with sister companies as they sought help in rectifying the problem.
“We are looking to do a bypass and we expect that within the coming week, the appropriate material and technologies would be here for us to start with that bypass. That bypass would allow us to lower the levels within the sanitary line so we can do further investigation as to what has been causing the blockage,” he said. (HLE)
