The Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has re­port­ed a tem­po­rary re­duc­tion in wa­ter pro­duc­tion at the De­sali­na­tion Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (DE­SAL­COTT) fa­cil­i­ty due to re­cent changes in the qual­i­ty of the raw sea­wa­ter en­ter­ing the plant.

DE­SAL­COTT ob­served on Feb­ru­ary 22nd an above nor­mal pres­ence of or­gan­ic ma­te­r­i­al in its in­take wa­ter, a vari­a­tion that is usu­al­ly a nat­ur­al oc­cur­rence. To pro­tect equip­ment and en­sure the fi­nal qual­i­ty of drink­ing wa­ter, plant process­es have been ad­just­ed, re­sult­ing in a tem­po­rary re­duc­tion in out­put.

WASA con­firmed that wa­ter qual­i­ty re­mains safe for pub­lic con­sump­tion and that treat­ed wa­ter con­tin­ues to meet the high­est safe­ty stan­dards. In­ves­ti­ga­tions and sam­pling are on­go­ing in sur­round­ing ar­eas, in­clud­ing the Cou­va Riv­er out­let, to bet­ter un­der­stand the fac­tors af­fect­ing the raw wa­ter sup­ply.