LETTER: Ewarton councillor blasts NWC on the verge of her retirement

LETTER: Ewarton councillor blasts NWC on the verge of her retirement

July 1, 2020 0 By Horace Mills

Dear Editor,

I wholeheartedly agree with Comrade Zulieka Jess of Central Clarendon, as I too believe that everybody deserves to have running water in their pipes.

Water is not a luxury. Water is a necessity. Water is life, and even moreso with this COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing ills.

How is it that after our MP Hon Robert Pickersgill OJ has overseen so many water projects in North Western St Catherine in Bermaddy, Ivy/Mount Rosser, Jericho/Orangefield, Cassava Pond and other areas in the constituency we are still struggling with inadequate water distribution?

Too many of our communities are still without water.

How is it in this day and age some people still have to go to river to bathe and spring to get domestic water?

From 2007, I have been lobbying for adequate water supply in the Ewarton Division; and no doubt the previous councillors did.

In 2015, French contractors Vinci supposedly spent $450 million to upgrade the Ivy/Mount Rosser station, so that Polly Ground, Gidden, Byndloss, Mount Lopez Heights, Bottom Ivy and parts of Whitehouse and Orangefield would get piped water. But, up to now in 2020, these places still have to depend on trucked water and some people don’t get any – or don’t get enough.

I have worked with all the relevant persons in middle management in National Water Commission (NWC) to solve the problem, but have not got the desired result.

Senior management refuses to respond to me even when the Commission’s Public Relations Officer requested that intervention.

It seems to me that NWC does not respect the rural customers and has no ambition to fulfill their mission.

While not being the only service provider in the country, the NWC is charged with the responsibility of being the main provider of potable water supply, as well as the collection, treatment and disposal of wastewater services to the people of Jamaica.

NWC programmes and projects need to be audited because the agency, with some of the best technical and commercial brains in this country, is the most ineffective and inefficient essential service provider.

It is time the NWC takes the ‘knees of poor service off the neck of North Western St. Catherine – and especially Ewarton Division’.

For too long NWC is killing its customers with high bills and little or no water in the pipes!

Yours Truly,

Beverly Jobson-Grant,

Councillor, Ewarton Division

St. Catherine


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