The people living in the St. Mary’s South constituency have been assured that the
water supply to their homes and businesses has reached a point described as being
‘stable.’
What this means, according to Utilities Minister Melford Nicholas, is that while
consumers can expect a regular supply of water, there may be times when there are
disruptions because of a system failure.
The minister reported that when for example, he checked the daily readout from
the various plants on Sunday night, he noted that one of the four units at the Ffryes
Plant which serves the southern corridor had been down. By Monday morning, the
minister was able to advise the nation that a repair team was already at work
getting the unit back online.
“There can be disruptions, but what Mechanical and Project Engineer, Brian
Nicholas has said is that with the experiences that we have had from the other
areas, a lot of redundancy and resilience has been built into the Fort James plant
and the challenge for APUA, over the next year and a half, is to get all the RO
plants similarly equipped,” he stated.
Minister Nicholas explained that when a plant goes offline, for whatever reason, it
normally takes roughly 24 hours for it to return to full capacity. “That’s why we do
not desire too many of these instances. This is why too, that even with the energy
needed to run these plants, I have asked for that level of resilience to be built in. So
all of the critical components, including the production plants and the transmission
systems where the main booster stations are, now require backup power to
operate,” he further explained.
The minister revealed that APUA is about to spend a further $2 million to purchase
backup systems for the RO plants.
