THE sore issue of newly rehabilitated roads being dug up by the National Water Commission (NWC) to fix broken water mains was a major area of concern for some members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) at its meeting on Tuesday.

The matter again surfaced as the PAC reviewed the Auditor General’s Performance Audit Report on the National Works Agency’s (NWA) management of the main road network.

Member of Parliament (MP) for Clarendon South Western, Luthan Cousins said he and other representatives often experience the frustration of fixing a road, “you turn your back, NWC come and dig it up.”

He noted that the common complaint has always been that the NWC and the NWA don’t seem to communicate, despite the signing of a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the NWA and the NWC in 2018 for the repaving of roads dug up by the utility company.

Cousins expressed concern about whether Jamaicans are getting value for money, given these “inadequacies in planning”, which leads to additional costs.

In response, chief executive officer of the NWA, E G Hunter said the “logical causative reason why it happens” is because most of the water infrastructure underground is old and fragile.

“It is well known that a lot of the infrastructure is old and dated. So, for example, the water main that was on Constant Spring Road was 89 years old. It’s an old cast iron pipe with lead joints. We all know…the implication of lead in water supply. So one of the things that usually happens is that because of fragmented planning, yes, and fragmented implementation over the years, the road authority usually go and deal with roads without reference to anything else, the water utility usually goes and does its thing without reference or anything else,” he said.

“So, the manifestation of overlaying a road that has fragile pipes underneath it is that the equipment will stress the ground. That stress is translated to the pipe material and it will break. If the break manifests during the construction, it’s easy because you can fix it then. But generally though, it manifests sometime afterwards and so you need to go back and excavate,” he added.

MP for St James Central, Heroy Clarke, noted that the practice has always been that once the water pipe under the road doesn’t show any signs of deterioration then they are not dug up, but often, inevitably, after the road rehabilitation some damage is later discovered.

“When you put a 10 tonne or 20 tonne compactor on the roadway to compact the road to give us that nice velvety looking barber green, it’s going to do some things underneath and so a month down the road, we start to see water coming up, are we going to leave it? We have to dig it up,” he said.

Clarke, who is also deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, said he would love for NWA and NWC to have repairs done quickly whenever this happens “so that people don’t see six months down the road the water still running on the road or the part where you dig out is still left unfixed.”

He further raised the issue of utilities being placed in the middle of the road which are then disrupted when repairs need to be done, and suggested that going forward when new roads are being built that this practice is not maintained. “Let us find some way of putting it to the side of the road,” he said.

Hunter responded to say that where utilities are placed is a technical matter, noting that it is the sewage main that is placed in the middle of the road, explaining that from a public health point of view there has to be virgin earth between a water main and a sewer main to prevent contamination if there is a leak.

“When a water main is in action, the pressure inside the water pipe is higher than the pressure outside the water pipe. When there is a break, the pressure decreases and it sucks in anything, that is around it, so you have to have virgin soil between a water pipe, and a sewer pipe, just in case there is a leak on the sewer pipe.. So these are engineering considerations,” Hunter explained.

He said that the alternative is to create a utility corridor, where it is encased in concrete, but noted that the construction is a little more complex.