Short term water problems will persist, says CEO

Water was very much on the minds of Belize City residents this weekend…or rather the lack of it. The shortage played havoc with washing, housework and bathing, as frustrated consumers turned on their faucets only to find warm air. Today News 5 travelled up to the water treatment plant at Double Run to find out what went wrong. C.E.O. of Belize Water Services, Peter Wrench, explained.

Peter Wrench, CEO, Belize Water Services Limited

“We’ve got a new treatment works we’re trying to graft on to the existing treatment works. What happened over the weekend is that we were doing a connection between the two, which should have been–I wouldn’t say routine–but should have been a six hour operation. When we installed the new pipe work, we found that one of the gaskets linking the pipe work blew. New this of course wasn’t planned, and it meant that it took us very much longer to get back online that we’d expected. When we did get back on line, we couldn’t put the amount of water that we were hoping for into Belize, so as we speak, I think Belize is still not getting enough water at the moment. We’ve been working around the clock to get the parts necessary to get it back online.”

Ann-Marie Williams

“There’s some parts of the city, particularly on the northside with good pressure, and some parts of the southside with a little bit of pressure. What can you say to people to allay their fears in terms of when this will all end?”

Peter Wrench

“It will all end in October. Until then it’s going to be a tough time. It’s gonna be a tough time for all of us because there’s not enough water here to satisfy demand and the pipelines between here and the city are too small to take the water through there. Now, the pipeline is going very well. That should finish ahead of programme and that might make a bit of difference. It would probably help some people out, but I won’t help everybody out. Until we double the capacity here, until we get that capacity on line, then the problems won’t be solved.”

The shortage returned to the city for much of today, but by newstime, water, albeit under low pressure, had returned to much of the old capital.