NWC cares

THE EDITOR, Sir:

The National Water Commission (NWC) notes and responds The Gleaner article published on Thursday, January 24, 2019, and attributed to your columnist Mr Mark Wignall.

The NWC regrets any delay in our responding, and effecting repairs to, a leak reported by Mr Wignall and his neighbour. That leak has now been repaired.

I hasten to point out that while the vast majority of leaks are ­repaired within the globally recommended five-day time frame, NWC does have a stubborn challenge where too many leaks take longer to be repaired. This is made worse during periods like now, when the Corporate Area water supply ­systems are being operated in abnormal supply conditions that both create more leaks and ­demand more of the time and attention of crews who would ­otherwise be working on leak repairs. For that we apologise.

In fact, the NWC’s Kingston and St Andrew (KSA) Non-Revenue Water (NRW) Reduction Programme, that is now in the fourth year of its five-year ­implementation cycle, is deliberately aimed at attacking exactly that problem by improving pressure management to reduce leaks and to aggressively search for, night and day, and ­repair leaks. We care enough to be spending US$42.5 million to fix this problem.

In that process of water ­management and leak ­detection, we also have to prioritise the ­leakage repairs. Hence, a ­significant non-visible leak that is discovered by our leak detection teams, that may have existed for a long time, will sometimes be prioritised over a recent, visible leak that is an ­obvious nuisance. While this does not always appear so, it is the ­technically correct thing to do.

THOUSANDS OF REPAIRS

Over the last three years of the KSA NRW programme, more than 10,000 visible and non-visible leaks have been repaired; 6,009 leaks were repaired last year; and since the beginning of the year, 497 leak repairs have been done in KSA alone. Unfortunately, the one reported by Mr Wignall was not among these.

The National Water Commission’s approximately 2,000 employees are led by a president who is ­supported by six vice-presidents with responsibility for specific areas of the enterprise’s operations.

Especially given the nature of the water and wastewater utility business, this is by no means a top-heavy management team and is, in fact, below the water utility benchmark standard ratio of ­management to staff. This ­information is publicly available on the NWC website and in published annual reports.

We again apologise for any delay in responding to any leak on our network and assure you that the NWC does care and, like the ­columnist, hates to see water going to waste.

Charles Buchanan

Corporate Public Relations Manager

National Water Commission