The wastewater podcasts, part 2: the Caribbean

An interview with Wayne Williams (Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association)

This is part 2 in a series of blogs about wastewater that I will publish before 24 December. All are based on podcast interviews I did in the past months, in cooperation with UN-Habitat, with seven experts worldwide.

Wayne Williams in Trinidad

After the first podcast in Ghana, we started a worldwide digital tour to compare the wastewater challenges in different regions. The second podcast brought us to Trinidad in the Caribbean, where we spoke with Wayne Williams, the Executive Director of the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association.

When Wayne had finished college in Florida in the mid-eighties, he returned to Trinidad and started working at the water utility. He soon found out that all attention was given to water and not to wastewater. In addition, Trinidad had just experienced its first oil boom, which had resulted in new large communities housing with associated treatment plans that were not connected to the existing infrastructure. The Housing Authority was unhappy with this extra task they were not equipped for, so a job became available for Wayne as a wastewater officer.

Where to find funding for wastewater treatment?

Now, decades later, Wayne Williams has a wealth of experience in Trinidad and internationally, especially in the Caribbean. A common problem is that the wastewater treatment plants in the region are usually underfunded. The tariffs are too low; therefore, operation maintenance costs will far exceed what is retrieved in taxes.

But there are more challenges. For example, septic tanks are used in many houses and smaller communities, which is a decent solution from a health perspective. But that is not always a workable solution; for instance, you need waste treatment plants when working with larger hotel structures in touristic areas. And that leads to more challenges; it requires legislation, governance, standards, and training to operate the plants. So this increasingly needs attention in the region.

Challenges like monitoring, collecting enough and reliable data, governance, and financing were mentioned by Jerry Asumbere in Ghana and Wayne Williams in the Caribbean. The following podcasts will show that some of these issues are also mentioned in other regions.

Hurricane season: an additional challenge in the Caribbean

But some parts of the world have unique characteristics. When I asked Wayne about the Caribbean's unique challenges, hurricanes came first to mind. Their destructive power increases, and it leads to the loss of infrastructure. Climate change also leads to dry seasons becoming dryer and wet seasons becoming wetter.

And although the total annual amount of precipitation hasn't changed much, these extremes have a considerable impact. For example, the runoff during heavy rains goes so fast that the underground aquifers are not getting the recharge they need. Then this water floods other areas, especially if you have wastewater infrastructure with manholes in the road. And these problems lead to other issues, like plastics and rocks entering the water infrastructure and choking up the system or further down, the debris causes troubles in the treatment plants.

These problems then lead to overloaded treatment plants, so some of these have no other option than to bypass the waste of the incoming wastewater so that you don't ruin the plant. And in the dry season, you also face new challenges. Those plants are designed for a minimum flow, and too little water asks for other solutions to deal with that situation.

So what is needed is to create an infrastructure that can function in today's extreme weather, and you can't expect that from the old structures that are still being used but designed for different conditions.

Wastewater creates additional threats to coral reefs

An old statistic says 85% of wastewater is either untreated or undertreated. But that number was revised recently; it is now in the 60s, but that's still too high. And one of the significant challenges of untreated wastewater is that it gets into the ocean and impacts the coral reefs. Sadly, these are dying now for different reasons. One of these is the impact of liquid fertilizer coming from the land in untreated wastewater. It results in sea grass growing so much that it chokes out the coral.

Listen to the podcast

These are just some of the many issues we discussed in this podcast; I encourage you to listen to the full podcast via the button below (or you can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts).

Wayne Williams

Tomorrow, I will probably publish the following wastewater newsletter, number three in a series of six.

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Photo coral: Image by joakant from Pixabay