The United Progressive Party (UPP) says the Browne Administration’s poor management of resources has created the water crisis the country is now enduring.
At present, half the country is out of water for 72 hours on account of “emergency maintenance” being undertaken at the Crabbs water plant.
However, Political Leader Harold Lovell says that Crabbs and all the reverse osmosis plants on Antigua have not been producing at capacity, largely due to inadequate maintenance of equipment and the shortage of supplies.
Lovell says the Crabbs plant is producing only two (2) million gallons of water a day, which is about half of its 2016 output. The Camp Blizard plant, likewise, is down to 300,000 gallons from the 600,000 it once produced daily.
Meanwhile, the plant at Shell Beach and the two at Ffryes have dropped 700,000 and 250,000 daily gallons, respectively, he says, and Pigeon Point’s output has been reduced by 100,000 gallons a day.
In addition, Lovell chides the Government for its failure to commission two UPP-installed storage tanks, at Patterson’s and Buckleys, and to connect another tank located at Collins, while residents and businesses are suffering.
And yet, he says, the Administration is preparing to spend US$14 million on another reverse-osmosis plant – without deploying these three tanks with a collective storage capacity of more than one million gallons – thereby continuing the waste of water.
Lovell also rejects as a “big lie” the notion that up to 40 percent of the water produced is lost to leakage, since the evidence of this would be obvious all around the country, he says.
- He says that figure was created only to conceal the fact that, under the mismanagement of the Browne Administration, the plants have been significantly under-producing.
