Santo Domingo residents may have to suffer a weekend without water in the pipelines. CAASD director Alejandro Montas said that the city is losing 70% of the water going through the pipes, or about 77 million gallons a day, and a pipe section needs urgent repairs.
He said his crews would be working round the clock to install a 70 inch pipe section and complete the repairs.
While the rupture is being attributed to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, news reports focus on what appears to be negligence on the part of the Santo Domingo Water and Sewer Corporation in failing to correct the problem in time.
A 67-inch pipe that was damaged near Boca de Mana in San Cristobal now needs to be replaced. Diario Libre quotes local residents as saying that the pipe was patched up in August 2011. “The last time that they fixed it all they did was repair the leak. They put a patch on it and placed like 300 sandbags on top of it. The sandbags were carried away by the river and the pipe was broken again,” said Eligio Casilla, the village magistrate in Boca de Mana.
The CAASD director admitted to the former repair job, describing the work that was done last September after Tropical Storm Irene went over the area as “negligent.”
The inhabitants of Boca de Mana, the place with the same name as the creek where the pipe broke, said that a year ago the CAASD took out and changed one pipe that was in worst shape and the other was repaired. Now, with the flooding of the rivers, things have got worse.
Montas told Diario Libre that the job would now get done properly. “Now we have to do the complete job. The work on the bridge will get done later, but we will finish installing the gabions in the river and we are going to change the pipes,” he said. The pipeline repairs will leave most of the National District without water for three days, and the CAASD has still not figured out how much the repairs will cost.