After years of waiting, people living in The Belle, Licorish Village and surrounding St Michael areas that sit on the Zone 1 water table, are being promised relief by the Barbados Labour Party (BLP).
“I would not know how to lead this country and leave the people out there in the circumstance in which they find themselves,” party leader Mia Mottley told supporters gathered outside RTR’s Minimart in Back Ivy, St Michael, Tuesday night.
“It is the greatest pain that I carry as a Barbadian because I feel we were coming close last time [in the 2013 elections] . . . but we have a commitment to make sure that these people can have running water; that they can get security of tenure; that they can be Bajans like anybody else in this country.
“They need a sewerage system. They need a reverse osmosis [system] . . . . That is a technical and engineering thing, but what I am telling you for sure is that it cannot continue,” she added.
Mottley said that between 1965 and 1966, a Democratic Labour Party Government led by Prime Minister Errol Barrow, set out zoning based on biological contamination alone, not taking into consideration future engineering solutions and other developments. She explained that back in 2006, then Minister of Health Jerome Walcott presented a paper to the Cabinet on the Rezoning Of Barbados which proposed Government going out to tender to get a study done.
“For ten years this study has been available [and] it has been sitting down there and no decision has been taken . . . to move to the new recommendations instead of the Zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
“If you move to the new recommendations, and if you look at new engineering solution, then the life of the people in The Belle and Licorish Village would be different. You could then go to the bank and you can go and get security of tenure at the credit union,” Mottley stressed. (ROG)
