The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

A key Water & Sewerage Corporation (WSC) contractor yesterday said it was “well ahead” of its 2014 target to reduce water system losses to 5.49 million gallons per day, having replaced 25 per cent of New Providence’s service connections.

Paul Fanner, director of Miya (Bahamas), and head of its local operations, told Tribune Business: “We are going into year two of implementation. We did a study in the second half of 2012, which developed the implementation strategy, but we didn’t do any work on the ground.

“We started work on the ground in 2013. At that time the annual average non-revenue water (NRW) was calculated to be 6.87 million gallons per day. We beat our target for last year.

“We have got annual targets as well as a five-year target. We beat our target last year quite comfortably. Our target for this year is 5.49 million gallons per day. We have saved a significant volume of water.”

Mr Fanner added: “Up until the end of August, the rolling average is estimated around 5.24 million gallons per day, so we are already below the target of 5.49 million, and it comes down every month because we are reducing NRW quite steadily.

“We are well ahead of target, basically. We have got another four months of numbers to crunch. Obviously, to hit our annual target we have to be below that target in the latter months of the year.”

Mr Fanner said the NRW project had not been without its share of challenges. “The quality of a lot of the infrastructure in the ground is very poor. Part of the work we are doing is replacing a lot of the service connections from the mains to customers’ meters because the quality of a lot of those connections was resulting in too many breaks,” he explained.

“So far we have replaced over 10,000 of the 40,000 service connections on the island. We have replaced 25 per cent of the service connections on the island already. We have also replaced 20,000 feet of main. That major replacement work is being done under a project that is being done by WSC.”

Mr Fanner added: “The geographic information system is also a challenge because almost every hole we dig, the pipe isn’t the same size or isn’t where it is shown on the drawings. We are continually updating the quality of WSC’s GIS as we find errors in it.”