Water to be scarce during system upgrade
If you’re planning on doing the midweek laundry tonight, you may want to make a change in plans. Beginning at eight o’clock, Belize Water Services will cut off the flow at the old treatment plant at Double Run in order to hook up the company’s new facility to the system. Since April of last year, B.W.S. has been running the new treatment plant and engineers feel that all the kinks in that system are sufficiently ironed out to join the two facilities. According to Operations Manager Roy Tombs, the fourteen hour outage will not leave customers high and dry, as arrangements have been made to allow some supply of water, but on a reduced basis.
Roy Tombs, B.W.S. Operations Manager
“This is the first in the series of five shutdowns that we’re going to do in the next six to seven weeks, hopefully ending by the end of August. Today we are doing some pipe work, which is connecting the old and the newer water mains together, so that if there are any problems at the intake, we can actually supply water from the old intake or the new intake to both plants…What we’re anticipating, we’re going to run the new plant, which can give us up to around seventy-five percent of what we normally require per day. We’ll be running that all the time and what we would ask customers to do is just be a little careful when they use their water for the next day or so, so that we can actually supply everybody with water. We do apologize if anybody does go out of water, but we don’t anticipate that that will be a major problem at this point in time.”
Patrick Jones
“When you say reduction in service, will some people find themselves with no water in their tap?”
Roy Toombs
“We don’t anticipate this at the moment, certainly overnight we won’t have any problems. The shut down is planned for fourteen hours. And obviously if it gets to the fourteen hours we will get into our peak demand time tomorrow morning. That’s when we will have our most concern. But we are filling the tanks up in Belize City, at Wilson Street and south side, so the main problem, if anybody goes out of water initially will be actually up towards Sand Hill and that area.”
Tombs says consumers do not have to fill too many buckets, but instead advises careful use of water until about mid morning on Thursday to ensure that there is enough H2O to go around. The project to interconnect the two treatment plants is being carried out by CISCO Construction Limited at an approximate cost of three hundred thousand dollars.
