Last week we told you about the water shortage being experienced in restaurants, hotels, and even private residences on the Placencia Peninsula.
It comes at what is an unusually high peak to the tourism high season and it's left many in the hospitality industry struggling to maintain adequate water levels needed for the luxury experiences promised to their guests.
Today, almost a week after they began to truck water onto the peninsula, BWS called a press conference to lay out their short and long term plan for providing adequate volumes of this process resource to one of the nation's key tourism destinations.
Alvan Haynes, CEO, BWS
"We are now catering for this in the short term by utilizing bowsers to transport water from Dangriga and from a well at Riversdale area that belongs to the Bowen and Bowen group, BAL. We are also seeking to get access to a well that is nearer at Riversdale that the land has private ownership and we are negotiating a lease so that we can access the wells, fortunately with Placencia we are able to truck water. It is obviously far more expensive to truck water, but unlike the islands, San Pedro and Caye Caulker almost impossible to transport the quantities of water. We are now able to move 45,000 gallons a day to help to boost the Placencia supply, so that it is almost normal."
"We are reducing pressure at night to allow our reservoirs the reduction in pressure starts at 10 p.m. at night and it lasts until 5:00 in the morning."
"We expect that next year we will have the large project completed and this situation would have been resolved completely, at this point we are not sure if we will be finished in time for next easter, but we are going to push the project to try to get that done knowing what the situation is and knowing the impact it has on the hotels and tourism."
"Even though, there is an issue, we believe that we are handling it as well as we can in the immediate short term and the project we have going will take care of the much longer term as we are planning for a 20 to 25-year growth with the new project completed."
And while the CEO laid out the plan BWS's CFO told the Press exactly how much it's costing:
Rashida Williams Castillo, CFO, BWS
"We have three bowsers, that C.E.O. mentioned that we are currently transporting and that roughly is costing us about $2000 per day, um, we as mentioned we do expect to continue this until the easter peak and so we know that this amount will be reduced once we are able to truck the water from a closer distance in Riversdale, so currently we are trucking from Dangriga water treatment Plant and that is the highest cost that it is costing us right now per day."
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