Some of the newly-installed community water tanks donated by corporate Barbados to the state-owned Barbados Water Authority (BWA) are being removed and replaced.
This was disclosed this afternoon by general manager of the BWA Keithroy Halliday in response to complaints by some residents in St Joseph and St Peter who expressed concern that the covers of the new tanks did not have locks and therefore there was a risk of being accessed by humans or contaminated by rodents or rain water.
“The tanks which were opened were being removed and replaced with ones that were sanitized,” Halliday told Barbados TODAY. He said the issue was being addressed today by the authority's team.
He gave the assurance that locks were ordered as part of the installation process and should soon be in place.
“We take the safety and water quality as primary importance. A rush order on the locks is being done. Those in stock did not fit the ones donated and we had to order new ones,” he revealed.
The fears of the residents in St Peter and St Joseph regarding the quality of the drinking water in the tanks came to the fore during the Christmas period as they experienced sporadic water outages over a number of days.
One St Peter householder made it clear she had no intention of drinking the water from the tank which did not have a lock, insisting she would only use it for washing clothes. Some had complained that not only were they unable to cook because of lack of access to potable water, but were unable to take a shower until late in the evening and into the night.
One woman in Mount Brevitor, St. Peter, said she was forced to use a bottle of stored water to bathe, since she had to go to work.
However, when Barbados TODAY drove through some of the affected areas, on Wednesday, residents said that while they were without water most of Christmas Day, the precious commodity returned to their taps later that day.
While the Mount Brevitor community has been experiencing water problems for several days, some residents said not having access to water on Christmas Day was unacceptable, even as others said that their dirty clothes were piling up.
Some householders in Horse Hill, St Joseph said water began running from their taps again Tuesday evening.
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