DEVELOPMENT-JAMAICA: Water Woes Hit Capital City

By Zadie Neufville Reprint | | Print |

Zadie Neufville

KINGSTON, Apr 1 2001 (IPS) - When the state owned National Water Commission (NWC) announced here recently that water restrictions would include daily lock-offs in Kingston and St. Andrew, it never made a difference to the people of D’Aguilar Road.

The residents of this dilapidated section of the capital, Kingston, have learnt to live with dry taps. For long as they can remember, they have had to store water. Water buckets have etched rust stains on the floors beside the toilets.

They are at the end of the water supply network, and although many are legitimate NWC customers, leaky pipes, illegal connections and NWC restrictions make their supply almost non-existent.

“We always had to stay up late at nights, or get up early in the mornings to get a little water to drink. If I want a good shower, I have to be in the bathroom before 5:00 am,” Genevieve Williams, a householder said.

“For the three years I’ve been here, it’s been the same story,” added Sharon a security guard who refused to give her surname. This story is repeated several times over on a street that was once home to the wife and child of one of Jamaica’s prime ministers.

With only a few weeks’ supply left in the Mona Reservoir and Heritage Dam, the main storage facilities for Kingston and the metropolitan region, the NWC is resorting to lock-offs to conserve water. City residents will experience lock-offs for eight hours a day in staggered shifts between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm and between 8:00 pm and 4:00 am.

NWC’s public relations officer Charles Buchanan said a prolonged drought in watershed areas around the dam and reservoir has dropped the level of water in the Mona Reservoir to just 70 percent of its capacity and the Hermitage now holds only 40 percent of its capacity. Silting has also reduced the storage capacity of both facilities by 2.5 and 29 percent respectively.

The NWC says its programme of lock-offs and lowering the water pressure to save the precious liquid is being complemented by other measures such as replacing old pipes, fixing leaks, regularising illegal connections, maintaining equipment and seeking new sources of water.

The Water Resources Authority (WRA), the agency that manages and regulates the nation’s water sources, is working with the NWC to solve the problem of water shortage. Head of the WRA Basil Fernandez says Jamaica has enough water to supply its needs. Only about 11 percent of the total surface water and 25 percent of the underground water is utilised annually, he said.

Fernandez explained that the NWC has no reliable means of knowing how much water it produces. Fernandez estimates that the NWC produces between 19.6 million litres and 21.2 million litres of water each month to supply 85 percent of Jamaicans with potable water. But for a significant percentage of customers, bills are estimated because they have no metres.

Water restrictions are not new to Kingston. The lock-offs and low- pressure periods have grown in recent years even as two-thirds of the city’s ground water supply is being lost to contamination. Faecal bacteria from the many sewage pits in and around the city have invaded the underground water system. Soak away pits continue to be the primary method of sewage disposal in Kingston even though several communities were linked to waste water systems in the 1970s.

The Yallahs pipeline, built to transport water from the neighbouring parish of St. Thomas, is no longer adequate and rivers serving the Hermitage Dam are running low. The watersheds that supply them with water are severely denuded. Water woes have also spread to some rural communities that have never had problems in the past because rivers are running dry and communities have outgrown the wells and tanks that serve them.

“While the restrictions are necessary now, it is expected that within the next two years the water distribution capabilities will be significantly improved,” Buchanan said.

Last Thursday, Prime Minister Percival Patterson launched the Kingston Metropolitan Area Water Supply Project. Expected to cost about 180 million dollars, the project will replace old and inadequate pipes, fix leaks and build a treatment and distribution system to supply another 32.2 million litres of water a day to the Kingston Metropolitan Region.

The Ministry of Water and the NWC now have a programme to assist rural householders to acquire tanks for water storage. The 100-truck rapid response unit is also on call to truck water into areas that need it, Buchanan said.

The government is still trying to raise 40 million dollars to build two dams planned for the south coast parishes of Clarendon and St. Catherine, the Ministry of Water and Housing said.

And a private developer plans to build a desalination plant just on the edge of the city to take advantage of a salty spring there. This, Fernandez said is the quickest way to solve the city’s 53 million litre shortfall. Fernandez said the spring has enough water to supply the shortfall for many years to come.

But leak repair programmes and water harnessing exercises may not provide all the answers, for the country is also experiencing lower rainfalls, longer and more intense dry periods and higher temperatures.

According to the Meteorological (Met) Office, rainfall patterns in the island have noticeably changed since 1988. They were particularly bad in 1997 and 1998 due to El Nino. The Met office has recorded a 20 percent reduction in rainfall during the traditional October to December rainy seasons in the nine years between 1981 and 1990 as against the rainy seasons in the 29 years between 1951 and 1980.

Last year the country experienced its worst drought in 70 years. Data show that the average monthly rainfall of 11 centimetres during the traditional rainy season fell by as much as 23 percent.