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Jamaica Authorities Put Measures In Place To Deal With Drought

KINGSTON, Jamaica CMC – The National Water Commission (NWC) says it is putting in place all the necessary measures to ensure that adequate water supplies are maintained across the island during the dry period that begins later this month.

NWC Vice President for Non Revenue Water/Energy Cost Reduction, Mark Blair, said that two of the major dams were not up to full capacity as yet.

“The Hermitage Dam, we are dropping about one million gallons per day and at the Mona Reservoir we are dropping about 75 million gallons per day. The issue with the Hermitage Dam is we have a lot of silt…. it’s 40 percent silted, so really, we are going to start doing some drought mitigation measures,” Blair said.

Blair, who was providing information on drought and rainfall projections for 2014, said that from next week the NWC would be restricting water to some areas so as “to ensure that we can go through the three-month drought period and hope that the May rains occur.

“For the Mona zone, which is on the eastern side of the city, we don’t expect any major restrictions there,” he said.

The NWC operates more than 1,000 water supplies and over 100 sewerage facilities island wide. These vary from large raw water storage reservoir to medium-sized and small diesel-driven pumping installations serving rural towns and villages across Jamaica.

Approximately 70 percent of Jamaica’s population is supplied via house connections from the NWC and the remaining 30 percent obtains water from standpipes, water trucks, wayside tanks, community catchment tanks, rainwater catchment tanks, and direct access to rivers and streams.

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