A few hundred yards from Richard Smith’s Paraquita Bay office on Tuesday, dozens of men were labouring away at a worksite that will soon house a large sewage treatment plant.
Other men dug at the ground with shovels, or bent rods of rebar that will form the shells of various structures.
At his desk, Mr. Smith, who manages the United Kingdom-based Biwater’s Virgin Islands project, looked at a multi-colour bar chart laying out all 470 steps that need to be completed to finish the firm’s contract.
“I monitor it twice a week to make sure everybody’s on target,” he said.
Biwater, which was given a no-bid contract in 2010 to help modernise the territory’s water production infrastructure and create sewage treatment systems, is close to completing the construction aspects of its contract, Mr. Smith said.
Last year the firm built a desalination plant in Paraquita Bay capable of producing 2.3 million gallons of drinking water per day.
Since then, it’s been working on the sewer-related aspects of its contract. Mainly, that means finishing the construction of wastewater treatment plants at Fort Burt and Paraquita Bay that will eliminate the need for untreated sewage to be dumped into the sea daily.
“They both started in February, and the idea is that they’re both finished by the 31st of July,” Mr. Smith said.
The company also has to build a new pumping station in Road Town and lay pipes to connect it to the Fort Burt plant.
See the April 16, 2015 edition for full coverage.
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