Govt lagging on sewage problem

I refer to the article in [Friday’s] WEEKEND Nation and the introductory: “No cancellation of bookings and no angry visitors leaving their paradise vacations this time around”.

Frankly, you let the Barbados Water Authority and the government off the hook far too easily. 

Someone should give their collective head a shake. The situation is disgusting. Paradise vacations do not include walking in raw sewage. Yet the situation persists and there is no urgency whatsoever to address, let alone fix, the problem. 

At the Big B/Massey Store at Rendezvous, water is constantly bubbling up from the sewers. The same is true at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet up the road heading into Bridgetown.

You pointed out several other places where the sewage is overflowing in other recent articles. I could go on, and to its credit, The Nation has been on this story for at least the last couple of years, but the question that remains is “where is the outrage? where is the urgency?” How can a country that is dependent on tourism allow the situation to persist? It should be treated as a national emergency, yet the reaction is somewhere between complacency and indifference, combined with a foul blend of denial, stupidity and incompetence, in no particular order.

The health risk is significant enough that the Worthing Post Office closed [Thursday]. Meanwhile, tourists are encouraged to enjoy the waters off the South Coast, blissfully unaware that raw sewage is flowing directly into those same waters.

The point is this. There will be negative fallout. There already is. Given a choice between returning to Barbados with raw sewage flowing in the streets and into the ocean and other, similar vacation spots throughout the world, it is not a difficult decision.  

Perhaps in a future article you can explain why hotels, homeowners and businesses have been so remarkably ineffective in requiring the government to address this problem. Is it because they are intimidated by the political ramifications in doing so? Or do they simply lack the political clout to compel action? Their apparent willingness to tolerate the situation is unimaginable. “Very concerned” is a remarkable understatement.  

Please keep up the good work. 

– EDMUND BRUTON