Thursday, March 28, 2024

Expert ready to solve sewage problem

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As Minister of Health John Boyce assures the public that the injection wells will be ready by month-end, a sewerage system expert says there is no need for them and he could solve the sewage crisis in a matter of weeks.

And, said Murray Chandler, the owner of Polly Septic Services & Equipment Rentals, this would be done without digging up the extremely busy Highway 7 to access the blocked lines.

Chandler was one of hundreds of Barbadians who turned up at Accra yesterday morning to take partin the Future Centre Trust’s Walk To Take Back Our Coast.

The South Coast sewerage system has been experiencing problems for more than a year caused by blocks and breaches in the network.

“We are prepared to go in and clear the line, flush the line, inspect the line and put it back in order within one month.

“I will have the lines cleared both here and up by RTs and the line by Bird’s Eye View, by the old Scotiabank right out to Big B Supermarket cleared, flushed and running again and I am going to clear the one by Kentucky within two weeks,” Chandler said.

He stressed there need not be any disruption to traffic as his plan did not entail excavating the road to reach the sewer pipes.

Chandler went on to dismiss the Barbados Water Authority’s (BWA) much touted 300-foot injection wells which are being readied to take millions of gallons of effluent so BWA officials could get to the blockage in the line.

He believes that effluent should be pumped out to sea.

“If you have 300 feet of rock, where you will be digging into the aquifer, you do not have any displacement of filtration to take place.

“I would say the best way out is out to sea because the sea can handle that pressure. If we contaminate that [ground]water we will have to start drinking bottled water forever because once we make that mistake, we cannot go back and make any changes because it will be underground pollution that we cannot control,” Chandler declared.

Meanwhile, Minister Boyce, who is the Democratic Labour Party candidate for the area and who was present at the start, said the injection wells would be ready to take effluent by the end of this month.

“Once that is done, the engineering team and the repair team could have access to the pipe which carries the sewage itself,” he said.

“The presence of sewage on our roads is something which concerns all Barbadians,” he noted.

“We have certainly, at the Water Authority, been putting processes in place to mitigate that and the Ministry of Health continues to monitor the situation to issue the appropriate advisories, to take the appropriate action to make sure that threat to Barbadians’ health and lives is absolutely minimised and that people are aware of what we can do,” he said. (HLE)

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