The inadequate supply of potable water in Jamaica over the past 25 years during the dry season has been due to a large extent to the failure of all governments to give priority to the development of supplies, especially to the southern parishes – mainly Kingston and St Andrew. The need for sufficient capital investment was not really recognised and the politicians took for granted that the sources would always be available to meet the demand for water. This was a lack of vision. The whole water pattern changed and the flow from rivers

was considerably reduced, lowering the capacity in storage. In the meantime, the population increased from 1.6 million to 2.6 million over the past 50 years. The two main sources of supply in Kingston and St Andrew are the Hermitage Dam and the Mona Reservoir.

In 1927 the Hermitage Dam in St Andrew was built with a capacity of 393 million gallons per day. The sources of supply for the dam are the Wag Water and Moresham rivers. But during the dry period the level of storage is greatly reduced. The level in early April this year was down to a mere 25 million gallons per day. The Mona Reservoir was built in the 1950s with a capacity of 809 million gallons per day, the source being the Hope River. In the 1980s a pipeline was installed which took water from the Yallahs River in St Thomas to the Reservoir and this improved the storage to a great extent, but the drought reduced the storage level to about 30 per cent of its capacity in April.

In the 1970s the Rio Cobre Water Supply Project was implemented and more recently the Kingston Metropolitan Improvement Programme was put in place at a cost of US$85 million to provide additional water to St Catherine and Kingston. The project made a major contribution to the supply, but it was still not sufficient to meet the increasing demand. In the northwestern parishes supplies have been expanded with the implementation of the Queen of Spain scheme. There is the Great River scheme from Montego Bay to Lucea, built in the 1990s at a cost of US$40 million which has boosted supply in Montego Bay and other areas, and there’s the Negril Water Supply scheme which covers areas from Lucea to Negril. There is also the US$17 million Braco scheme which covers parts of Trelawny and St Ann. Because of the programmes carried out in the north-western parishes, the prolonged drought has not affected these areas. The southern parishes and sections of St Ann are the areas that the drought has seriously affected. Indeed, most of the improvement over the last 10 years has been centred in rural parishes. There are 460 water supply systems in the country and only 80 are affected by drought, and most of these serve Kingston and St Andrew.

The NWC cannot rely on wells in lower Kingston and St Andrew to augment the supply as the water is contaminated and some wells have had to be put out of comission. There are rivers like some of those in Portland which are supplied by underground sources. The flows in these rivers are consistently high, but the cost of conveying the water to Kingston and St Andrew through the mountains makes such a project uneconomical. Perhaps seawater should be converted into potable water as done in some countries, including the Caribbean area. The problem is not so much lack of water in Jamaica but to garner enough supply during the wet season to meet the requirement in the dry season. Many people have advocated the construction of more reservoirs and dams, but where is the water to come from during the dry season when flows from the rivers in certain parishes have been greatly reduced? As far as cloud seeding is concerned, the

government has decided against it because of the unpredictability of its outcome and the potential damage to the country’s fragile infrastructure in case of severe flooding.

However, better days are ahead for the people of Kingston and St Andrew as far as potable water is concerned. The NWC is embarking on a massive US$211-million scheme – the Jamaica Water Supply Improvement Project which is to be implemented over the next two years. The NWC says the most critical aspect of the project is that it will finally address the perennial water supply problems which for decades have been plaguing sections of the Kingston Metropolitan Area, including Kingston and St Andrew, Greater Spanish Town and Portmore.

Financed by Scotiabank, BNP Paribas and the French contractor, Vinci, the project will improve existing supply in the Kingston Metropolitan Area by an additional 20 million gallons per day and will result in the elimination of major water lock-offs, says the NWC. The current need is about 15 million gallons per day, but provision has been made to meet increased demand for a few years beyond the next two years. About 71 per cent of the population is now getting house-to-house supply which is good by international standards, according to the NWC, and this will be increased to 85 per cent when the project is completed. There are certain areas where it would not be economical to take water.

The project includes a number of water supply schemes in several other parishes, not just Kingston and St Andrew. In particular, several rural water supply schemes spread across a large number of parishes have been included. These schemes are aimed at significantly increasing the percentage of rural households with access to in-house potable water supply. A major part of the project will be the replacement of the old Rio Cobre asbestos cement pipeline which brings water from Bog Walk along the Gorge to the KMA in order to reduce leaks and improve supply reliability. Another aspect, which is of particular interest to consumers, is the installation of 75,000 customer meters in the KMA and Ocho Rios to determine more accurately consumption and reduce commercial losses. Thousands of the meters are old, rusty and slow, and do not measure consumption accurately.