After decades of delays, government officials promised Monday to commission East End’s first public sewerage system within the next two months.
But before that can happen, they said, households and businesses must apply to the Water and Sewerage Department to get connected.
The announcements came during a media tour of the nearly completed Long Swamp Sewerage Pump Station, which officials described as one of the final steps in completing a 5,000-population sewerage system that successive governments have been promising for more than 20 years.
The pump station — a half-million-dollar project built by Bio-Safe Treatment and Septic Solutions — is about 85 percent complete, Bio-Safe Project Manager Marquese Maduro said during the Monday event.
The outstanding works, he added, include installing a manhole, finishing and inspecting electrical components, and testing pumps. He estimated these works will take about a month in the absence of weather delays.
“I know the minister [of communications and works] is keen on having this project wrapped up,” Mr. Maduro added.
Communications and Works Minister Kye Rymer said the station should be ready for commissioning in about six weeks and added that the Paraquita Bay sewage treatment plant “should be [ready] around the same timeline.”
Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley, who represents the Seventh District, also attended the Monday event.
“The fact that we are here encouraging residents to sign onto the system, or to hook up to the system, is a sign that we are nearing completion,” Mr. Wheatley said.
Eighth District Representative Marlon Penn, an opposition member, echoed calls for residents to connect.
“I do want to encourage persons in Long Look, Fat Hogs Bay, neighbouring Long Swamp, Greenland to connect to the system,” Mr. Penn said. “We all know the challenge that we’ve had with sewerage in our community for decades.”
Need for connections
Residents can apply now to the WSD to be connected to the system free of charge, according to Dwayne Fraites, chief of infrastructure and development at the ministry. “The ministry is going to be providing all the resources, all the works in terms of any costs associated with persons coming to connect to the system until 2026,” he said.
The Paraquita Bay treatment plant is designed to cover a maximum population of 5,000, which is an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 households, Mr. Fraites said.
Connecting residents to the sewerage system is vital for it to function properly, he added.
“The minimum the plant could take in general is about 25 percent of [the maximum],” he said. “So you’re looking at probably, give or take, maybe about 300, 400 households as a minimum,” Mr. Fraites said.
Residents in Fat Hogs Bay, Greenland and Long Look will get the “first opportunity to connect, because the systems in those areas are relatively complete in the sense of just making the connections to the households,” Mr. Fraites said.
He added, “The second phase would be like those persons in Chapel Hill, Major Bay, Parham Town when we come through with the main works — the gravity lines from Parham Town to Long Swamp.”
Decades of delays
The East End/Long Look Sewerage Project aims to give the village its first public sewer system by connecting it to the treatment plant in Paraquita Bay, which was built about eight years ago but has never been used.
The project is part of larger plans for a national sewage system that date back at least to 1974 but have been hampered by decades of delays that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars due to scrapped plans and subpar work that had to be restarted numerous times.
In 2010, the Virgin Islands Party-led government awarded a no-bid contract to the United Kingdom-based company Biwater, which resulted in Biwater’s completion of a water plant and two sewerage treatment plants: the one in Paraquita Bay and another at Burt Point to serve the Road Town area.
Operational plant
The Burt Point facility started processing sewage in late 2015, though it stopped operating following Hurricane Irma and didn’t come back online until last year.
However, the Paraquita Bay plant, which was completed around the same time as the Burt Point one, has never been used: Despite patchy progress over the past decade, successive governments never completed the pipe network and other infrastructure to connect the plant to East End, largely due to a lack of funding.
At least twice, the government transferred money away from the EE/LL project to another purpose: first to the new Dr. D. Orlando Smith Hospital and then to the pier park project.
Missed targets
In recent years, officials have periodically claimed the project was progressing even as multiple completion targets were missed.
In 2020, for instance, Mr. Rymer promised to complete the system the following year.
And when Bio-Safe was awarded a $511,786.97 contract for the pump station in June 2023, he said it would be commissioned in 2024.
