Residents in Christ Church and St Philip Experience Water Outages Due to Mechanical Problem and Burst Main: Barbados Water Authority Works to Resolve Issues

A few depressing trickles of water greeted some residents in Christ Church and St Philip when they turned on their taps over the weekend.

On Saturday, a mechanical problem at the Hampton Station affected the Rising Sun Reservoir in Christ Church which supplies water to areas in these parishes and following the repairs, engineers from the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) discovered a rupture in a 16-inch main near Woodbourne, St Philip, yesterday. Two weeks ago the Hampton Station was offline for repairs and the past weekend marked the second time the same residents faced water outages.

Acting chief executive officer of the BWA Keithroy Halliday said it would be difficult to tell if the weekend’s incidents were related without an assessment.

He explained that burst mains were not unusual along the catchment area of Hampton and Rising Sun because of aged infrastructure.

“As we go into these facilities, and you start changing and improving and repairing, sometimes there are other issues that come to the fold. Yesterday [Saturday] we would have had a mechanical issue that took some time to resolve.

Then today [Sunday] regrettably in the same catchment area we have a burst main so the same residents in the main are the ones that are affected,” he said.

Large catchment

The difficulty, he said, with such a large catchment, was meeting the demand in a timely way.

“That is the frustration that our customers face whenever there is an outage in either from Hampton, or those affected by the Rising Sun, catchment area. This is why we will continue to encourage everyone to store extra water. We appreciate and understand the frustration but we are just doing our very best,” Halliday said, adding that along with the repairs engineers were working on the main to prevent a recurrence.

The BWA dispatched tankers to the affected areas, but the high demand left some residents with a long wait.

In Kingsland, Christ Church, some residents claimed that they had not seen a tanker for the two days and one resident, who chose not to be named, said she heard the sound of a tanker on Saturday