Increasing water demand pushes NWC to search for larger sources
Published:Wednesday | October 31, 2018 | 12:00 AMPaul Clarke/Gleaner Writer
Plans are in the pipeline of the National Water Commission (NWC) to significantly expand its water transmission systems by utilising larger and more reliable sources such as the Rio Bueno in Trelawny to meet the demand of the growing population.
Additionally, the water company is finalising arrangements to take 15 million gallons of untreated water from the Rio Cobre in St Catherine.
"That is an additional amount of water that would serve parts of St Catherine and parts of Kingston and that will make the system more reliable," said Charles Buchanan, NWC's corporate public relations manager.
The majority of Jamaica's raw (untreated) water sources are situated on the north coast.
According to Buchanan, the NWC is now looking at ways to strategically build-out a significant inter-connected water supply system that will mitigate the effects of drought conditions in some parishes at certain times of the year.
"We want to be interconnected to the larger, more reliable sources. So as we go forward, we will have to gradually build out where you have the larger systems connected to larger sources. In addition to that, construct more built-in excess capacity to enable the quickest and easiest response in case of fall off in supply in another location," said Buchanan.
NO NEED TO CONSTRUCT NEW RESERVOIRS
Buchanan said that it was not necessary to construct new dams or reservoirs to have reliable water supply, pointing to the more than 450 systems across the country.
"Many of these water-supply systems are very reliable, year in year out, even during what is classified as the drought period. These are supplying and meeting the needs of those persons served by those systems, yet we only have two raw water storage reservoirs in the entire country," he said.
"So the issue of the need for raw water storage reservoirs is not necessarily required for having a reliable water supply system. If that was the case, then the 450-odd water-supply systems across the country would be absolutely unreliable because we do not have any connection to any raw water storage facility as the greater Kingston metropolitan region has in the case of the Mona Reservoir and the Hermitage Dam."
Raw water storage reservoirs are used to collect untreated water to be later treated for consumption and other daily use.
"What we really need is a more reliable source of adequate water. If you have that, then your need for man-made raw water storage capacity would be unnecessary. However, if you have reliability issues, then you may want to build storage to help secure against the unreliability of these sources," Buchanan noted.