The government has made it clear to APUA’s water management team that they should either shape up or shape out where the distribution of water is concerned.
Various communities around the island have been experiencing dry spells in their taps, a situation that the government says should not be happening based on the current production of water produced by the reverse osmosis plant
Information Minister Melford Nicholas said when the management of APUA was invited to Cabinet to discuss the matter this week, they were read the riot act
“The Cabinet invited senior members of the APUA water division and the general manager to express at this stage, significant discontent with the performance of APUA. Especially as we would have provided a lot of material resources to enable them to get to the level of production of reverse osmosis given water,” he told the weekly Cabinet press conference this morning.
According to Nicholas, MPs have been complaining over significant periods, that there are persons in the communities who are experiencing no supply of water for over two weeks
“We are advised that APUA is producing up to 7 million gallons per day. Yes, there have been some temporary and periodic disruptions caused by the weather, but by and large, they are up to a constant supply of about 7 million dollars per day,” he said.
The APUA management team was advised that if the matter is not adequately addressed, the consequences will be severe.
“This is the mandate that they were given also with the promise that there will be not-so-nice consequences should this matter continue. It will be left up to the management as to how they respond to that challenge. What we have said is that there is significant production of water to ensure no parts of any community should be left without water for any period. If there’s a shortage then they should be able to rotate without people having to be without water for more than two days,” Nicholas said
The issue of the inadequate water supply has been a vexing issue for several months, one that opposition forces have been using to make political mileage.
The apua has been getting blame to prop up the politicians ego.i can vividly remember the 80’s ehen there was what you call “brown out” where the voltage was low due to conductor inadequately used to serve the load capacity theteby causing low voltage and parts procurement for the generator had middle man with that same minister now, all because they weren’t paying suppliers, and v.c bird at the time blamed the workers for outages abd bad service, and committed the defense force to patrol the poles at night and should shoot any apua worker near any poles at the side of the road. At that time mr piggott was doing a study to solve the low voltage which saw the transmission line built by the Italian. That and other implementations solves the issue that tje workers are so falsely blame. I cam imagine the water management and others situation, i strongly empathise with them.
The problem is not having enough water storage facilities in each community. Carrying out regular preventative and corrective measures (maintenance) on each RO plant and storage facility. Spare parts for the RO plants and storage facilities should always be on hand for maintenance repairs. Some of the CIP money should have been used to construct water storage site facilities in communities.