Western Avenue to mile 9; 1,400 consumers without water

Over a thousand residents on a stretch of the Western Highway experienced a dry spell today. According to Belize Water Services Limited consumers from about three hundred and thirty homes were without water during the day. The problem stems from an operation at the Burton Canal Bridge at about mile six on the Western Highway. So the one thousand four hundred consumers of the Mile Eight community, Western Pine and Sunset Park will have to wait until the repairs are made. B.W.S.L.’s Operation Manager Dave Pascasio says that they hope to have the pipes fixed as soon as possible.

Dave Pascasio, Operations Manager, B.W.S.L.
“Our customers are out of water right now; everybody from Western Avenue to mile nine on the Western Highway.”

Jose Sanchez
“That’s about how many people?”

Dave Pascasio
“I’m not sure of the numbers. I can get the exact number for you afterwards but what we are doing is we are locating some other valves to turn off so that we smallen the number of customers out of water. So pretty shortly we will be closing a valve at Cisco construction so that the people from that point going to mile nine won’t be out of water in the next maybe ten minutes or so.”

Jose Sanchez
“So what’s happening at bridge?”

Dave Pascasio
“What happen, we are suspecting that vibration over time—they are building the approach to bridge and we are figuring out that they might have been using heavy vibrators and that has just made the pipes move away from each other.”

Jose Sanchez
“So how are you planning to fix it?”

Dave Pascasio
“What we have to do we have to break up the concrete block that we have there, block the pipe, put the bridge and then redo the connection.”

Jose Sanchez
“How long will this take?”

Dave Pascasio
“It’s hard to say at this point in time but we have everybody who is available trying to restore water supply to our customers on the Western Highway as quickly as possible.”

Jose Sanchez
“All customers will see their water back on by how many days?”

Dave Pascasio
“No, it’s not days, it’s some time before everybody goes to sleep. I would hope that we get it done in a matter of hours. Right now we are asking customers along the Western Highway to bear with us. We are trying our best to get the water supply back.”

Pascasio says that they would also need to work in cooperation with B.T.L. as their equipment also occupies the same location. Late word to News Five was that water was restored by eight p.m.