DEBBIE JACOB

ANY LIST of pressing problems we have in this country must include water woes, yet the extent of this crisis still has not hit home. To be fair, WASA has shown unexpected improvement.

I no longer wake up at 3 am to gather dripping water in buckets to store for the day as I did when I first came to Trinidad 42 years ago and lived in Warrenville, central Trinidad. I now get water nearly every day. It helps that I can afford a water tank. Not everyone can.

Scheduled maintenance and unforeseen breakdowns at pumping stations get repaired faster than they did in the past. I no longer spend hours on the phone, waiting for days to complain about not having water.

I’m grateful I don’t have to stew in my anger as I listen to those WASA advertisements about conserving water while the water from the broken pipe up the road runs like a river down my street. The hotline seems more efficient, but I haven’t had any luck making online reports.

That’s the good news, but the bad news is that those leaks keep coming. The water pipes on my road break so often that water has eroded all the asphalt in parts of the street. Who's fixing that?

WASA’s progress can only be measured relatively speaking, so it’s possible to say pipe repairs are fixed in a more expeditious manner, which means leaks get repaired in days to weeks rather than months after filing a complaint.

I once thought our water problems would be over once WASA figured out how to give us water more regularly, but now there’s a new problem: too much water. I suspect water pressure burst two pipes in my yard, and I blame the blowout in the pipes leading to my washing machine on high pressure. The pressure is so high, it burst pipes in the road soon after WASA fixed them.

It’s hard to see water wasting when a recent newspaper story by Anna Ramdass said only 27 per cent of TT households receive water 24/7. For years, we’ve been on a water “schedule,” a euphemism for rationing. Mostly, we still receive water only at certain times of the day. Occasionally, my neighbourhood experiences a constant water flow, which makes those leaks even more worrisome.

People often speak out about our water problems. In a recent letter to the editor, Stephen George wrote, “WASA has been plagued for decades by inefficiency, bloated staffing, poor service delivery.” He spoke for all of us when he said, “The citizens of this country deserve better. We deserve a WASA that works – one that delivers clean, reliable water to every home and community. We cannot afford to keep pouring resources into a failed system that has already proven incapable of reforming itself without decisive action.”

He addressed the politics swirling around WASA. But realistically speaking, the problems associated with WASA are a result of poor planning that stretches back decades. Bad decisions made long ago may have doomed us to wasting billions of dollars over time.

I learned this about 25 years ago when WASA and I argued about a pipe leaking on my street. A WASA representative told me the pro