Rare and precious fresh water

Meterologists tell us this is not the “petit careme” come early. And while WASA are assuring us that the reservoirs are full, nevertheless the Authority is offering substantial prizes for consumers reporting the most leaks — and if that isn’t a sign that WASA is worried about the state of the reservoirs come the dry season in December, I don’t know what is.

However, do you know how lucky you are every time you turn on the taps in your kitchen, bathroom, yard – or at the standpipe if you don’t have water 24/7 in your own home? Maybe you don’t realise you’re looking at that rare and precious resource – sweet, fresh water. I admit from time to time it reeks of chlorine, but that’s because WASA is making sure that, unlike so many other parts of the world (including the US) the water in our mains is fit to drink.

So, with another salute to WASA’s chemists, let’s ponder the fact that by and large, we have more water than we can use, yet less than we need because politicians of every stripe are, and have been, allowing water to run to waste in ageing, disintegrating mains and few of us are demanding that the powers-that-be change their ways to save our water supplies.

Apart from a desperately needed national mains replacement programme, Government throws water away by ignoring the fact that bush fires strip hills bare, allowing rainwater, too, to run to waste. Every so often, after a particularly bad dry season, the Government of the day allocates part of the National budget to fighting bush fires. In 2001-2 I’m told there was even a budget for leasing water bombers from Canada.

That money was never used because it wasn’t needed. The 2001-2 dry season was unusually wet with comparatively few bush fires. So, come the next budgetary allocations, since the Forestry Division of the Ministry of the Environment hadn’t used that money, it went back in to National kitty. There would be no (and there wasn’t any) money for water bombers in the 2002-3 dry season.

Come late November and early December (2002) the Met Office was already warning whoever would listen that the 2002-2003 dry season could break all records – for bush fires, if not for actual drought. Forestry listened in dismay. So, too, perhaps did the Ministry of the Environment – and any and every other environmentally conscious person and NGO in TT. However, no doubt knowing the Meterologists’ reputation for being wrong 60 percent of the time – and still keeping their jobs, Treasury (or whoever pays monies out of the National Purse) turned a deaf ear to all requests.

Pedestrians downtown choked in the smoke from bush fires in St Ann’s, Cascade, Maraval while politicians in the air-conditioned Red House bickered, ignoring the criminal destruction of precious natural resources – timber, and the rainwater that would create floods and run to waste in a few months’ time.

Our leaders willfully shut their eyes to the fact that, due to the bush fires on the hills in the dry, when the wet season comes rainwater ought to be seeping down through the natural filters of layers of leaf litter, soil and sands and fractured rock to fill the aquifers, our natural underground reservoirs – instead of hurtling down to the plains, wreaking havoc en route, flooding farms, factories, houses and stores.

Aquifers, those unseen natural reservoirs, are more precious than Hollis or Navet or the Arena or Hillsborough dams because neither sun nor wind can dry up the water underground as it can on the surface, nor, so far as I know, can aquifers fill with silt and have to be abandoned — as has happened with dams and surface, man-made reservoirs elsewhere, and may well be happening here, too.

Of course, WASA has to drill wells and install pumps to extract underground water, but man was digging wells well before Father Abraham fought water wars for the wells of Canaan.

If the forecasts of prophets of doom and gloom come true, in the not-too distant future, instead of the oil and gas and current religious wars in the Middle East, sooner or later countries will go to war over water rights.

As an island republic we can forget about water wars. However, we can be reasonably sure that when the floods sweep down the bared hillsides to fill WASA’s purification plants with silt and the Authority has to shut down for clean-up operations, there’ll be protests.

We may not burn down the Red House as our forebears did in the Water Riots a hundred years ago, but people protest vigorously whenever dry taps and stinking toilets raise human passions to fever pitch the world over.

“Never mind,” say the politicians, who make quite sure their monthly take-home pay more than keeps pace with inflation, and have no need to flinch on opening their quarterly WASA bills. “Never mind about all that rainwater running to waste in the Gulf of Paria – we’ll get it back again by building desalination plants…” — meanwhile blandly ignoring the havoc created by deforestation that is directly responsible for the yearly floods damaging homes, businesses, food crops.

So, finally, a word to the wise, report those leaks, take a course in plumbing if necessary to fix leaks at home, clean your teeth and wash the wares in a basin rather than under a running tap to save rare and precious fresh water that could be in short supply come January 2015…