Whitfield residents take risky walks for water

In the struggle to get access to water, some residents of Whitfield Avenue in St Andrew have no option but to risk their lives and venture behind enemy lines to secure the precious commodity from a makeshift standpipe, even while their community is at bitter odds with rival neighbours.

It is a decision that weighs on them heavily as they contemplate the risky trek to areas such as Barnes Lane, one of the communities along Maxfield Avenue among which there is constant rivalry.

“Dem brave bad!” one Whitfield Avenue resident, who requested that his name be withheld, told The Gleaner recently.

“Mi nah go over deh so (Barnes Lane), and sometimes dem can’t go over deh so when shot a fire either. Dem can’t go over deh go ketch water,” he briefly said, noting that enemy turf was a no-go.

Still billed monthly

Julian Barnes, who has to cross Maxfield Avenue with her bottles regularly to fetch water for her household, is one of hundreds of residents in Whitfield Avenue area crying for a constant supply in their own pipes as they are still billed monthly by the National Water Commission (NWC).

“We still get bill in here so,” she complained to The Gleaner. “That supposed to reach ‘bout $200,000 and we no have no water in a di pipe. ... Mi just go ‘cross and full up and use di landlord trolley or use mi hand [to carry the bottles] and come back over,” Smith said before laughing at her own plight.

But it’s a task she does out of love for her children and to carry out essential domestic activities.

The other alternative, she said, is to purchase water from private truckers, who visit the community infrequently.

“You have a man weh full drum. Depends pon di size drum, you have $800 and mussi $700, [but] sometimes, we no see di truck fi weeks,” Smith said.

Her landlord, Wesley Gregory, who has been living in the Whitfield Avenue community for decades, said that he has never had a consistent water supply for any period of note through the NWC pipes.

He is left at the mercy of operators of water trucks, filling various size drums for between $500 and $4,000.

“I’m here from 1982, [and] a pan mi bathe inna! Forty years mi live ‘roun ya and a just pan mi bathe inna. Joke! Joke!” he lamented.

“Once in a blue moon water come ‘roun yah so and mi a get water bill – $200,000,” the frustrated elderly man told The Gleaner.

Residents along other streets off Maxfield Avenue had mixed experiences with their pipe water supply. Melcalfe Road residents were grateful that they had not been having any water restrictions of late. On Alexander Road, residents complained that the “water lock off at the top of the street”, while a resident living “at the top of Rodney Road” said he has not had water for a long while.

One resident said that the councillor for the division, Eugene Kelly, “a try hard fi get wi water”.

“He brings truck of water around here, but him alone cannot do it. Him a do him work,” she said.

In an interview with The Gleaner, Kelly said the problem has persisted throughout his time serving as a councillor, especially since his division is a “red zone” for the NWC, which he explained to mean that the agency was not getting a lot of revenue from the area.

“But the NWC themselves have failed the residents wanting to pay and I have said to NWC, ‘Come and meet with them. Set up an office in Whitfield Town.’ I haven’t seen that done,” Kelly said.

Property titles

He said another major problem with regularising the connections for some residents lies in the fact that some of the original owners for the properties have died and those who have inherited the titles have either migrated or moved off the properties.

“Water goes with the property, meaning that the bill comes in the [name of the] owner of the land,” Kelly told The Gleaner.

Some of the pipes are also old, which were not replaced when major road upgrades were being carried out.

“For the majority of our roads, we have good roads. That was [done] under a project from the previous [St Andrew South Western] member of parliament, Portia Simpson Miller, and when the project was to start, we said to the NWC, ‘Please come’, because they claim that they (the communities) have the very old pipes underground. We said to them, ‘Come and take out these old pipes before we begin to fix the roads’. We waited on them for months. It never happened. The project had to go on and the roads had to be fixed,” he explained.

Responding to the concerns on Thursday, NWC President Mark Barnett said that the company has been working towards addressing the matter.

“Currently, we have a project that will help to resolve that. Part of the challenge in that general lower St Andrew/Kingston community is the size of the pipes and they have been there for years. They’re all encrusted. We’re going to replace a number of those pipes,” Barnett told The Gleaner.

“I should be executing almost $250 million for the project, which is also complementing the over $3 billion worth of pipeline replacement that we have just done ... or are just about to be completed on Spanish Town Road, so that links together,” he briefly said.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com