— GWI blames contractors for faults

THE Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI) is on a mission to correct structural and implementation faults that have emerged during the executing of a US$412.3M Linden Water Supply Rehabilitation Programme.

The faults have resulted in limited and poor quality of water to Linden residents.
The flaws were highlighted by GWI Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Van West Charles, who visited Linden on Thursday with a delegation of engineers and other officers to discuss the project with regional officials.
The project was funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2011 and UEM Incorporated of Trinidad and Tobago was awarded the contract.
It sought to provide 24 hours of water supply from the two plants in Amelia’s Ward and Wisroc to the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard as well as provide reliability onsite power generation and production of sodium hypochlorite.
Linden was chosen for this multi-million dollar project because the residents for years have received limited and unsafe water supply from five deteriorated plants.
However, six years after, the water situation in Linden has not improved and there is no 24- hour water supply to homes, persons continue to depend on water tanks and purchase purified water for consumption.
Dr. Van West Charles said the project has not met its expectation.
“Many flaws have been constructed and hence the expectations of the project cannot be met and GWI is now seeking to make changes to resolve a series of the flaws, but in essence will also require addition investment to make sure that Region 10 has good water supply,” the CEO said.

PLANT DESIGN
GWI Director of Project Implementation and Partnership Building, Ramchand Jailal, explained to the officials that the first issue with the plant is that the design of both the Amelia’s Ward and Wisroc plants were the same, despite treating two different types of water: ground and surface water.
In the construction phase, the contractor erred in the placing and pouring of the concrete, the variation of the filters and executed poor designs to the pipes at Wisroc.
As a result of these faults, leaks were presented and the concrete walls of the wells contain a significant amount of moisture which can eventually lead to corrosion of the reinforcement bars due to prolonged exposure.
There were no by- pass mains and well as defective soak way for the Wisroc plant. It was highlighted that the plants’ expectations were to supply 16,000 cubic meter (cm) per day to the community, but only 10,000 cm per day is supplied which leaves a gap of 6,000 cm per day.
Councillor Gordon Callender revealed to the team that Wisroc benefited from 24- hours water supply prior to the execution of the project, and now since the new reservoir has been installed, the community suffers from limited water supply.
Councillor Charles Sampson said during the execution of the project, the contractor was advised of mistakes being made but it fell on deaf ears.
“Advice that was given by the residents of the communities, lots of those advice were not heeded,” he said. With the completion of the project in 2016, most of the objectives were not met and the project was not able to make a positive social impact on the entire community.

GWI INTERVENTION
Jailal said GWI now has to pump millions of dollars to remedy the faulty project since it is basically back to square one.
“We are forced now as an entity to put money towards refurbishing the existing plant, $60M towards the Mackenzie plant and West Watooka plant” to remedy some of the faults of the contractor and consultant, Jailal said.
In addition to these, another $60M has to be spent to remedy the filtration problem and another $20M to remedy the distribution system.
Other gaps to be addressed by GWI are the non-revenue water reduction programme, installation of water meters for all customers and replacement of mains in Christianburg, Wisroc, Half Mile and Canvas City.
Looking to the future, GWI is currently exploring river bank filtration with drilling of new wells. The water company has already engaged a Dutch firm with years of experience in drilling wells which will do so at 1/3 of the standard cost.
Dr. Van West Charles said his mission is to have purified water running from house taps and GWI is exploring options of laboratory testing.
“One of the things that I want to do is to restore people’s confidence to be able to drink the water from the tap,” he said. With the commencement of the rehabilitation project, residents of Linden should expect improved water supply earliest.