Email

Print

Belize Water Services says the number of complaints it is receiving about cloudy and discolored water continues to go down.  

Today we spoke to operations manager Dave Pascascio about where the utility is with cleaning up the water supply.  He also discussed the issue of turbidity or cloudy water, which the Ministry of Health yesterday said was at twice the allowable limit:

Jules Vasquez
"Where are we at this current Thursday October 31st with those complaints?"

Dave Pascasio - Operations Manager, BWSL
"My records are showing that yesterday we got 3 and today we are just about that same amount."

Jules Vasquez
"And these are from what area?"

Dave Pascasio
"One from the Northside and 2 from the Southside. It could be 2 things Jules, it could be people are not calling us anymore and we still encourage them to call because only then we know and we do our sample collection every morning, we have chlorine testing points around the city and it has not showed up in those now, so the turbidity in those are below .5."

Jules Vasquez
"When we're talking about these levels of turbidity, it’s not something that's apparent to the human eye."

Dave Pascasio
"No it's not. 0.5 or below, is the requirement, you will not see that with your naked eyes Jules."

Jules Vasquez
"We have a sample here with 10 and this looks like water that I would drink."

Dave Pascasio
"That is what we received from Hack as a comparative."

Jules Vasquez
"Now this is what would alarm you and this something you could see but this is 800."

Dave Pascasio
"That is 800."

Jules Vasquez
"So this is 10 and this is 800. Okay then in between you have one here that is..."

Dave Pascasio
"That is 20...."

Jules Vasquez
"4 times the requirement and still when you're seeing this, it’s like you're seeing clear water. It is something you would drink if you see this in a glass."

Dave Pascasio
"Yes."

And so, while turbidity - or cloudy water - is not easy for the naked eye to detect, you don’t need any special instrument to see what’s coming down the Belize river from the west right now.  The water is heavy brown, and possibly full of iron - which causes the discoloration at the plant when it’s mixed with chlorine.   Pascascio told us what BWS is doing to make sure it doesn’t cause cloudy water running into your home:

Dave Pascasio
"We went at several points along the Belize River, as far up as the Agua-Pino Cawich Bridge along with public health. We did collection there, we did collection at Banana Bank, we did collection at Santander, St. Pauls and we see the point where the turbid water is coming down and we know exactly, we have calculated and know more or less when it's going to reach down the water treatment plant. So what we did, we're still awaiting the results of those test, collection done jointly with public health. We have pre-empted that to say that if the iron level increases a double run again, we're going to put in the treatment process for it, similar process we're doing in San Ignacio. I was updated by my M&E supervisor that is system is going to be up and running by tomorrow. So it will be there, that if we detect the higher threshold with iron, that is going to react with chlorine, we'll be able to treat it."