MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Mandeville Mayor Donovan Mitchell is reiterating an often made call for the Government to tap into wells at Porus to provide more water to residents, arguing that the south-central town, which depends heavily on rainwater harvesting, is seeing early signs of drought.

“Drought now, as we speak, it is the responsibility of the [National Water Commission] to truck water to their customers, by law. You call them and you say, ‘There is no water coming through my pipe,’ or ‘Water is gone, you need to give me some water,’ because the truth is, whether or not you have water running through the pipe, you are going to pay a bill,” he said on Thursday night at a meeting in the upscale community of Ingleside.

Mitchell was responding to questions raised by the Jamaica Observer and residents regarding water supply to Mandeville and its environs.

“Ingleside has a water issue and every other day the pump blows up and we don’t have any water,” one resident said during the community meeting at the Badminton Club.

Mitchell then pointed to a long-standing proposal that wells which were used to supply water to the now-mothballed Windalco/Kirkvine bauxite/alumina plant be tapped into to help alleviate Manchester’s water crisis.

“The problem is that Government has to… have cojones. Windalco has five wells at Porus that have so much water that the Government just has to tell the Russians that we are going to take the wells. If you don’t take the wells, then we are not going to have enough water,” he said.

He told residents of Ingleside that a reservoir in their community is not sufficient to provide enough water to the area.

“I spoke with [a representative from] the NWC yesterday. He said I have just asked the hydrologists to look at us digging another well in Porus, so that we can get some more water, but the trick, even though you have a tank somewhere up in Ingleside, the water from Porus comes to that tank, its gravity feeds back down as far as to Williamsfield and those areas, so even though the tank is up here, you don’t generally get any water,” he explained.

“The situation is that we need to get some more water from the Porus side. I know they are doing something as it relates to Pepper,” added Mitchell.

The Pepper well field, downslope at low altitude in St Elizabeth, is the main source of water for Mandeville, which is more than 2,000 feet above sea level, atop the Manchester plateau.

Mitchell said the current phase of the Greater Mandeville Water Supply Improvement project is to supply Perth estate with potable water.

“As much as they are putting in some lines to go to the Perth property only the people who live in Perth might get some water. Nobody else will get water from that line,” he claimed.

In March, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness said the Pepper to Gutters Transmission Project formed part of a key component of the $4-billion Greater Mandeville Water Supply Improvement Project.

“The Government’s task in the provision of water based upon the legitimate expectations of the people is not to just pull the water out of the ground or out of the river, that is the production of potable and irrigable water supply which we have done looking at the old Pepper to Gutters, what we call the Greater Mandeville Supply Project,” he said.

“An element of that would have been to create a new well and rehabilitate the existing well, put in new pumps and various other sensors and systems to manage those pumps, so that they don’t go down,” he said, adding there would be a need to “regulate the electricity supply and then to put in some very huge ductile iron pipes”.

“I believe these would be 24 inches in diameter… and we will pump water from Pepper up Spur Tree and go to a re-lift station which will then pump further into central Manchester and north west Manchester,” Holness said.