A break in one of the Guyana Water Inc’s (GWI) 20-inch transmission lines on Church Street, resulted in service disruption for residents of central Georgetown yesterday and GWI’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Richard Van West-Charles said that the utility will have to look at upgrading the water distribution network in the city.
For most of Sunday, residents in the affected area were without water service. Engineers and field workers were, up to press time last night, working to rectify the break.
Van West-Charles was also present at the site and was being briefed by engineers on the situation.
“There is a break in one of the 20-inch transmission lines, this is the fourth break within two weeks. What we are now discovering and what the engineers are telling me is this break now is about a transmission line which was put down some years ago. It is now cracked along the pipe (where) you can see the water coming out…,” Charles explained to Stabroek News last night.
He added that because of the delicate situation underground, staff had to manually clear a path to extract the broken pipe and replace it. Machinery could not be used to accelerate the process because of the position of other transmission lines.
Sunildatt Barron, GWI’s Head of Field Services, indicated that his team was called in to repair a broken main but when they arrived at the site, investigations revealed that it was a bigger situation than they anticipated.
“Most pipes are aged. They have been around (for) more than 50 years…that is the contributing factor why it was damaged…other parts of this transmission line is damaged also because of the age of the pipe and the pressure in the line. We will have a rupture from time to time… we are now in the process of repairing that pipe,” Barron said.
Touching on the possible upgrading of the distribution network in the city, Van West-Charles said that the company can no longer ignore the collapsing distribution system.
“This is no longer whether we think we should, but an emergency that needs to be addressed…This whole network cannot suffice, we have pumps installed, electrical systems installed to give Georgetown a higher pressure and we can’t use them because of this porous network we have on our hand…,” he said.
