Undoubtedly, residents are currently experiencing unprecedented drought conditions on Anguilla. While there have been many dry years in the past, Anguilla has gone through prolonged periods of drought in recent times where the island has gotten little or no rainfall.
Older residents on the island would recall that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Anguilla used to get quite a few storms, throughout a year, producing a significant amount of rainfall. However, following the devastation by Hurricane Luis in 1995, Anguilla’s rainfall has been significantly low.
The hurricane of 1995 did much damage to Anguilla, and ever since that time there has been a distinct change in weather patterns impacting the island. In fact, the entire region has continued to experience extreme weather conditions – heat, droughts, floods, storms and hurricanes.
Anguilla, like the rest of the region, has been experiencing consistent annual periods of drought lately. What is different about the drought this year, is that this dry period is quite protracted. Because of this, vegetation that had survived over several decades – along hillsides and coastlines – has now dried up, leaving the soil extremely dry, cracked, loose and vulnerable to erosion. The persistent drought is also making availability of potable water very difficult for residents.
This presents a whole new set of challenges to the people of Anguilla.
Whereas, some people on the island tend to access the government’s water supply system, there are many Anguillian homes and businesses that have individual cisterns – and so many residents on the island depend on rainfall collected in the cisterns as their primary source of water.
The retracted period of drought is making it challenging for residents to have potable water when they depend on rainfall to replenish the supply in their cisterns. This is also true for other residents who depend on local suppliers of water from a number of wells, throughout the island, that feed into the same aquifer that the government taps into to supplement its water supply.
However, as the water from the aquifer is depleted, and with very little or no rainfall to replace it, ocean water will stealthily seep into the aquifer increasing the salinity of all the underground water across the island – to the point where there is not much difference between processing water from the ocean and accessing water from the aquifer.
Some residents of Anguilla choose to access the government’s water supply, although it is not always a reliable source since availability is intermittent at best, because oftentimes the water system’s infrastructure needs to be repaired and the flow of water is disrupted.
In separate discussions with government officials and representatives from the water corporation, there appears to be a major problem with the island’s water infrastructure. It is believed that over 80% of the water produced by the desalinisation water plant on the island, and pumped into the water tanks for distribution, is being lost through leakage along the underground water lines, resulting in only 20% – at most – of the processed water reaching consumers.
That being noted, the water corporation is obligated to honour its contractual commitment to the water-production company – SevenSeas – to pay for production of all the water that is being processed. In addition, it is also obligated to pay the electricity company – ANGLEC – to supply the energy used in the production and processing of the water.
We are clearly facing major water challenges on Anguilla, and because of global warming we are likely to see the current drought conditions continue to worsen – and residents’ access to a steady supply of affordable potable water continues to lessen.
What we don’t know is, how long this drought will last, forcing more and more residents to become reliant on the government’s water supply? What we don’t know is how long the government of Anguilla can afford to continue to supply water to residents at an 80% capacity loss? What we don’t know is how long local suppliers can continue extracting water from the aquifer before that water becomes so salty that it has to be processed?
It is imperative that either members of the government of Anguilla, or representatives from the water corporation, come out and address the people of Anguilla on the issues of the water crisis – because it appears to be bad now and has the potential to become much worse.
