[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter years without a consistent supply of clean drinking water, residents of Babonneau are finally getting relief. On Thursday July 12 the Water and Sewage Company Inc. officially launched the Hill 20 ten-inch pipe and the upgrade of the Hill 20 treatment plant. More water is now being pumped from the plant, to the delight of residents in all areas of Babonneau.
Work on the project began last July at a cost of $1.7 million. Four contractors worked on the project: Ned Samuel, Andrew Simon, Roy Melius and Steve Eugene, all Babonneau residents. WASCO chairman, Mr. Francis Denbow, said that completion of this project is already providing increased capacity for the major communities. He took obvious pride in declaring completion of the undertaking “with no cost overruns”.
Denbow thanked residents for their patience and apologized for the hardships they had endured. A teacher at the La Guerre Primary School for eight years was thankful. She said: “Often our tanks would go dry and it would take maybe a whole day to get WASCO to give us some water.” That situation, she said, caused problems, as parents would often forget to give their children drinking water and teachers would end up having to buy it for them.
“This was the situation until last week,” the teacher said. “From Thursday we’ve not had any problems. In fact we had to close our tanks because they were overflowing!”
A man who has lived in Boguis for the last fifty years said: “Sometimes we used to get water about once a month or every other week. Sometimes two-three months we didn’t get water here.” He had no other choice but to collect water from another district. “But for nine days now we’ve had water non-stop
Present at Thursday’s event was Babonneau MP Ezechiel Jospeh, also agriculture minister. He said he was happy that, despite some unavoidable delays, the project was now operational. He gave his assurance that, as the minister with responsibility for WASCO, he was determined to do all over the island what he had done for Babonneau. He cited projects “in the pipeline”: the second phase of the Dennery-North water redevelopment project, at a cost of US$8.5 million; Bouton will receive a 50 thousand gallon water storage tank and, in Vieux Fort, a water redevelopment project valued at ECS65 million will begin in the first quarter of 2019.
