Lee Hunte: Beetham wastewater plant wastes $1b

As WASA struggles to meet the demand of its consumers, Public Utilities Minister Robert Le Hunte said the Beetham Wastewater Treatment Plant was a wasteful and ill-conceived project that cost taxpayers close to $1 billion without producing one drop of water.

He said TT taxpayers have to consider that $1 billion as a loss even pointing out that it would have cost an additional US$250 million (TT$1.9 billion) if Government had continued the project to only produce 10 million gallons of water.

Le Hunte said if it had the funding WASA could get that amount of water at a cost $200 million or less.

He said the investment was not salvageable, other than WASA using some of the pipes from the discontinued project to help in pipeline distribution in other areas.

Since 2015, the National Gas Company (NGC) has been weighing its option on how to recover the debt. It had previously awarded the contract to Super Industrial Services (SIS) for the design and build of the recycling plant, together with pipelines and water storage facilities.

Le Hunte, who spoke to the media after the launch of Savonetta Booster Station at Point Lisas, on Friday, questioned how NGC got involved in water production, and could not state the company’s position on the debt recovery.

Stating he has been taking the “brunt of all the beat up” of WASA’s inability to properly service customers, Le Hunt said if WASA was able to get its hands on that wastewater money, plus the $700 million owed by residential and commercial customers, infrastructure and consumption demands could have been more efficient.

“Fixing WASA is a process.”

He said the repair of 1,500 leaks in the last four months and plans to fix at least 500 of the 1,100 still existing in the coming months, is being done at a tremendous cost.

He said it was a priority to reduce leaks to get the limited commodity to customers and to bring storage capacity within international standards. Road rehabilitation was secondary, he added. He said the storage capacity is 37 times lower than required with TT having about 11,758 imperial gallons (igd) per person compared to international standards of 439,939 igd per person.

Denise Lee Singh Perreira, WASA’s director, programmes and change management, said the station will boost flows and pressure to customers in central and south west Trinidad who previously received a scarce and unreliable water supply. An estimated additional four million igd of water will be available to the San Fernando Booster Station.

She said it is also a major component in the infrastructure upgrade required to provide a water supply to Caribbean Gas Chemical Ltd at Union Industrial Estate.

Le Hunte said $75 million was spent previously to connect a pipeline to the Mitsubishi plant at La Brea.

The Savonetta project which was executed by contractor UEM Inc, now Toshiba Water Solutions America Inc, at a cost of $39,097,789.04, started in June 2015 but was completed in April 2019 as the work was temporarily suspended from February 2016 to March 2017.

Lee Sing Perreira said WASA was able to reduce the cost by using an in-house team of engineers who took over the project management that would have previously required the use of a supervisory consultant.

Le Hunte said WASA has been able to reduce the contract bill by over $150 million a year by using in-house workers to fix leaks and do other work rather than hiring contractors. He applauded the workers and the union for their help in achieving this goal.