Mandeville, Manchester – For those attending Manchester’s 2030 Planning Forum at the Kendal Conference Centre late last month, the message from Basil Fernandez, managing director of the Water Resources Authority, was as clear as crystal. Don’t expect any quick-fix solution to Manchester’s domestic water woes.

Instead, says Fernandez, residents of Mandeville and the wider parish who have all grown sick, weary and tired of water lock-offs, should seek to help themselves through traditional rain water catchment and focused water conservation.

The hard and inescapable reality, Fernandez told scores of community, civic and business leaders at the planning meeting, is that the high altitude and geology of fast-growing Mandeville and other population centres on the Manchester plateau made water accessibility difficult.

“You don’t have any surface water. (Manchester) is a limestone plateau and as rain falls it sinks into the ground and disappears. there is some amount of ground water located at great depth of over 900 feet – except for Porus (South East Manchester),” he said.

“It’s a tremendous depth to drill to that water and a high energy cost to lift that water. You are located at a very high elevation, you have very scattered settlements, none of which are located around water resources.,” explained Fernandez.

Additionally, he said, while there were flood-prone communities such as Harmons in the parish’s south and Evergreen in the north, rainfall was, on average, quite low at 40-60 inches per annum.

Currently, Fernandez explained, the demand for domestic water in Mandeville and the wider Manchester – excluding agricultural, industrial and tourism needs – was 9.8 million gallons per day. But the potential supply was only about 8.5 million gallons per day and the actual supply was less than seven million gallons daily.

Existing water supplies flow mainly from St Elizabeth at Pepper just below the Manchester border to the tune of 4.5 million gallons daily, though the capacity is said to be five million gallons; also, from Porus just above the Clarendon border at between 1.7 and two million gallons produced by three wells, though there should be a capacity of 2-3 million gallons; and surface water from the Moravia Water Treatment Plant in northern Manchester, which produces a high of about one million gallons and a low of half-million gallons per day during the dry season.

Small amounts of water come from springs operated by the parish councils and from rainfall catchments also operated by local authorities.

Fernandez said that by the year 2031, based on a projection that Manchester’s population will be over 400,000, the demand for domestic water will be about 21.4 million gallons per day, calculated on a usage of 50 gallons per day, per person.

The Planning Institute of Jamaica’s Economic and Social Survey for 2005 estimates Manchester’s population at just below 190,000.

The forum at Kendal represented the “last step” by the Manchester Parish Development Committee in the formulation of a sustainable development plan for Manchester: ‘2030 and beyond’, which has been years in the making. Led by businessman Jackie Minott, the parish’s development committee was formed in February 1999 as a partnership involving the public and private sectors, civil society and service clubs and down the years has consulted parish-wide.

Water and the inadequacy of supplies have been sore topics in Manchester for many years. They featured prominently in the recent parliamentary election campaign with deputy mayor of Mandeville and losing candidate for Central Manchester, Sally Porteous of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), arguing that the parish’s water problems posed a severe hindrance to investment.

Fernandez told the Kendal forum that while the development of additional wells in St Elizabeth, where there is surplus surface water, could significantly deal with Manchester’s water problems, that could only happen when the domestic water needs of the people of St Elizabeth are met.

“We can’t export water from St Elizabeth to Manchester and the people of St Elizabeth don’t have any water. that’s one of the allocation priorities that we have, we must meet the demands first locally before starting to export .,” he said.

He pointed to current inefficiencies of water transmission that would have to be dealt with by the National Water Commission. These, he stressed, would not resolve Manchester’s water problems but could help to make life easier.

“There are issues to do with the lines, with the pumps themselves that need to be dealt with. We need to reduce unaccounted for water, we need to have more metering, need to ensure that people don’t steal water, we need to repair the leaks as they come up. all of these issues relate to unaccounted for water.,” said Fernandez.

Crucially, however, people would have to help themselves by “harvesting” their own water in tanks – a practice with a long tradition in Manchester, St Elizabeth and many other areas in Jamaica.

“.basically you have always done that in Mandeville,” said Fernandez. “Before the NWC came with the Pepper supply, you have had that system. (But) It has been allowed to fall by the wayside. People think that getting water in pipes is an upgrading of standard of living. It’s not,” he said. “What it is it just means that you may have a little bit more reliability of a supply, but it has not improved your standard of living and we need to get back to increasing your rainfall harvesting, not as a sole source of water, but as a means of augmenting our water source supplies to the parish.”

Additionally, he said, building and town planning authorities should ensure the use of water conservation gadgets, including low- flush toilets.

“Low-flush toilets work just as good as five-gallon tanks. you don’t need five gallons of water to flush, you are only adding to the environmental problems that we have, because Manchester does not have a waste-water treatment plant,” said Fernandez. “So everything goes down into the limestone, which is very, very permeable . contaminating the water resources.”