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Too many things are unacceptably wrong with this brown water situation. The State tells us it is temporary, and so far, it seems that is the only thing we can believe.
Yet, while we know it can’t go on forever, the transience we are encouraged to accept is annoying because it suggests a problem that is quickly being rectified.
Thousands of citizens have been affected by the duttiness coming out of our taps. People from a wide range of locales have shown evidence of its unsettling colour and the complaints are valid.
(via Saieed Ali.)
Yet again, the responses from officialdom are offensive. WASA has advised that the water is safe for domestic use. Nobody accepts that. What do they mean by domestic use?
I soaked a pot and the entire bottom of it was thickly coated with brown sediment—and this was at a point when the water was a little clearer. In fact, the water colour has fluctuated wildly, so that you feel hopeful that it is being sorted only to find it has gone rogue again.
You can’t do laundry. You can try to do dishes when you can see through the water, but it’s dodgy. My skin and my scalp feel itchy, even though I have tried to boil and bathe. Toilets and sinks look like public restrooms at their worst. You know how much work it will take to clean them up?
(via Michele Dunn.)
People have reminded us that at least there is water coming through the taps, a luxury they don’t have.
This is where you feel how easy it is for your living circumstances to be dreadfully affected by arbitrary acts. And you wonder about the competence and caring that is supposed to come from the State.
The Public Utilities minister, Barry Padarath, is reported to have told the Parliament that the “temporary water discolouration followed the scheduled maintenance shutdown at Desalcott, which is an annual event”.
An annual event! It’s part of a routine. And yet, no one thought to advise the public of this consequence. Did they even plan for it? Is this the level of competence we should expect from those entrusted to provide water, an essential for human life?
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2025.
On Thursday, the Guardian carried a news story that said: “The Seven Seas Desalination Plant will remain out of service for a further 24 hours as the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) carries out emergency repairs to a 24-inch main,” explaining that, “The main carries water from the desalination plant into WASA’s distribution system.”
Is this not relevant to the current situation?
It is one thing to say that this is a temporary state of affairs that is an expected outcome of maintenance work. WASA has given us lots of information about how sediment is disturbed, how the discoloured water follows the restoration of normal water pressure and how quickly that is resolved.
(via Wasa.)
Run your tap for a few minutes and it will clear up, we are told. That has not been the case, and it is the height of impertinence for the line minister to talk about past episodes of brown water under the PNM administration. What does that have to do with today’s browning?
Politicians have a way of invoking episodes from each other’s tenure, which is the equivalent of saying that it happened under their governance, so it is okay. It is not okay! Playing politics with people’s living conditions is obscene.
In our Parliament, the minister responded to a supplementary question that communities not served by Desalcott or the Caroni Water Treatment Plant also had discoloured water.
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2025.
“The challenges resulting from the shutdown of Desalcott and the Caroni Water Treatment Plant are not isolated or unique to those two facilities. They have impacted other areas that service different parts of Trinidad and Tobago, and therefore the challenges have remained the same,” he said.
He then said that recent rainfall had worsened the situation by stirring up sediment.
Two things come to mind. The weather is not an unexpected factor. We have been warned about the consequences of heavy rains, and there have been many public calls for the State to act to lessen the impact.
Flooding continues to be a seasonal occurrence as if every year we didn’t expect rain to fall.
It goes back to the question of competence. Planning is a key part of governance. But you have to care about the country before you make plans that make a difference. You have to care enough to act. You have to care enough to enlist the services of people who have real expertise in these matters.
No one doubts that WASA is doing what it can to fix things. But as usual, things have to get visibly bad before anything gets done. As is often the case when preventative measures are deemed unnecessary or not urgent, we are forced into a situation that has affected the population terribly.
(via Wasa.)
It is one thing for us to acknowledge that routine maintenance could be approached with such a lack of diligence—that in itself is quite dispiriting—because it tells us how vulnerable we are.
It is exacerbated by the dissembling being forced down our throats. On social media, people have been venting, rightfully, because this truly hits home. The country wants its politicians to drink from the chalice they are offering to us.
You can’t blame them this time.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
