4 days ago
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Residents in an area in the capital city are concerned over the release of sewage waste that has been causing issues. We join Correspondent LJay Wade for that story.
Ljay Wade, Love News: For the past few weeks residents of the capital have been complaining about a foul odor coming from this area on the East Ring Road of Belmopan. The smell of sewage can be traced to here, the Bullfrog Waste Water Lift Station which is owned, operated and managed by the Belize Water Services Limited. As you can see, untreated sewage water is leaking from the water lift station which is the main cause of the high smell of feces in the area. The leak can be attributed to faulty pumps within the water lift station that BWS has been aware of for months but we’ll get back to that. Now the smell, the smell is not confined to just this area. Following the natural path of the drainage system it led me here to a residential area in Salvapan where according to the residents they’ve been dealing with the pungent order for years.
Resident: “I don’t know if that’s sewage or something else but the water is coming from way up like 99 down and it really stinks.
Ljay Wade, Love News: Is it every day or?
Resident: “It’s most every day maybe we have one day for the week we don’t have it but most every day.”
Resident: “The only difficult thing is that the drain like we have some some bad smell from the drain most of the time like when it rains hard and the water is running, like it smells very bad. Sometimes we don’t even go out of the yard because it’ stink, it’s got a lot of bad smell. This drain has been here from since we came to live here. Well when we just came to live here it didn’t have the strong smell but now yes. I don’t know what’s happening.”
Ljay Wade, Love News: Now, what’s the cause of the overflowing of untreated sewer water leaking into the the capital’s drainage system. According to our sources, each water lift station is retrofitted with two pumps that should take hourly shifts in sending sewage to the water treatment plant. But for the past few months, one of the pumps stopped working, leaving the lone pump to become overworked and leaving room for sewage to leave the station and enter the drainage system. And now that I’ve shown you how the sewage water ends up in the drain that flows in a residential area of Salvapan, one question remains, where does the drain lead to? Unfortunately, a creek. The Mount Pleasant Creek, to be exact. You can see here where the brown, mucky sewage water meets the clean creek water, continues to flow downstream, where according to residents, a number of persons bathe and even wash their clothes. The Mount Pleasant Creek even flows beside the St. Martin’s Government Primary School, not too far from the point of contamination. We reached out to the Department of the Environment but didn’t get a response. We also reached out to BWS, which in an official response told us, and we quote, “Under normal conditions, wastewater from the Bullfrog Lift Station is conveyed to the Belmopan treatment plant where it undergoes full treatment and safe disposal in accordance with environmental standards.” The response goes on to state that BWS is investing approximately $250,000 to fix the problem and that works should be completed in the coming weeks. When we stopped by today, we noticed personnel pumping out the waste water lift station. We’ll keep following this story. Reporting for Love News, Ljay Wade.
English (US) ·