The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

Water manufacturers say third-party issues outside their control impacted the industry's ability to keep up with demand last week after a day's production was lost to the aborted lockdown.

Andrew Clarke, owner/operator of Crystal Select, told Tribune Business that “everything is fine” apart from his bottle supplier being able to provide the necessary volume because its operations are closed. He said: “We are just limited to the bottling companies, because once they do a lockdown the bottling companies can’t produce, so that kind of puts a hindrance on us.

"If the Competent Authority (Prime Minister's Office) tells us that we can open, then they need to mandate that the bottling companies should open as well. For five gallon bottles and one gallon bottles. We need to make sure that once one person is open then everybody needs to open, and that’s where this dilemma comes in. Everything else is fine here.”

Mario Williams, owner/operator of Crystal Clear H20, said: “I’m not getting any water from Water & Sewerage (WSC), so I am turning away customers. I am running out of water. I would send my customers home and tell them to come back at 5pm in the evening.

"I need a bigger water line coming to my building. I need a two-inch line, an industrial line. I need 20,000 gallons of water a day to produce 10,000 for people, but they don’t give me that much. They gave me a three-quarter inch line and I paid, and they said they would only give me a one-inch line, but they shouldn’t be that way with me if I asked them for something.”

Mr Williams added: “I burned up one of my machines five weeks ago because of it. Every time I go to WSC they tell me that the engineers know what I need and what not, but what I did is that I tried to do some other things just to get more water, and last week I started to get more water just by doing different things that I shouldn’t have to do.

"But I don’t like turning away my customers. I would run out of water at around 12pm, and I would tell them to come back around 5pm. I would keep going until about 7pm or 8pm."

Mr Williams said he had water on Friday and did not run out, as business volumes were lower than normal. A representative from Bahama Clear Drinking Water added: “Things have slowed down. It is slower on Friday than it was on the days before. It’s just normal."