Desalination is the answer
Dear Editor,
It’s the Great Water Shortage of 2012 and it is making our government look like the world’s biggest fool. Where is the responsibility of our elected leaders when it comes to our water supply?
We’re three months into the rainy season and there has been little rain. The river beds are dry and the water in many parts of the country, especially in Kingston, our nation’s capital, is now rationed.
At first they started shutting off water at 10 pm, then 9 pm. There was still moderate water pressure during the day, now all we have is a trickle. You’d think there was no imminent solution available. Wrong!
We are surrounded by countless trillions of gallons of water. And there exists a technology called desalination, whereby water would be pumped from the Caribbean Sea through a reverse osmosis system, removing all the salts, other minerals and pollutants, and then pumped into our homes as a water supply which never runs out.
We could withstand any drought, even if our island turned into a desert, and never be without water again. NWC profits wouldn’t suffer like they are now, since we can’t even bathe or flush our toilets for eight hours a day.
The costs of “desal” has come way down from what it was 10 years ago and today’s systems are much more efficient, featuring a cost as low as US $0.001/litre. One Canadian company offers a system so portable, it can be set up in one hour and doesn’t require an expensive physical structure to house it.
Take a few million from that US$1.3 billion we borrowed from our slave masters at the IMF (no truer initials were ever spoken; that’s what they do), and let’s get our first desalination system installed next week!
Jamaica, grow up! Give us some God-blessed water now!
On the following link you find a picture of an operational desalination plant. The baby can flush every toilet in our nation!
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Reverse_osmosis_desalination_plant.JPG
Michael Duberson
mduberson@yahoo.com