Elsewhere still, nitrates aren’t the problem — instead, residents’ taps run crimson because of iron contamination. The situation in Gunjur, a small, rural coastal town in the southwest, started five years ago, about a year after NAWEC began to supply water to this coastal community of about 15,000 inhabitants.
It took the trained eyes of microbiologist Ahmed Manjang to realise the changing water colour in his native village was not normal.
“I first noticed the poor quality of water in 2015, and I reported it to the NAWEC office through a telephone conversation, but I was told it was the water tank that was corroding,” Manjang said. He now lives in Saudi Arabia, where he works as a senior medical technologist at King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh.
Five years later, when he visited the village again while on vacation, he saw that the water was still the same colour.
“This time I collected the sample of water and took it to PURA to report the matter. After three days, they got back to me to say the problem was iron corrosion into the water”.
The high iron contamination of NAWEC-supplied pipe affects the taste of Gunjur’s water, and many residents prefer to get their water from a borehole that isn’t linked to NAWEC’s pipelines.
Gunjur resident Isatou Bojang said everyone living in her compound had stopped drinking water from NAWEC taps “for so long now”.
“We now go to the borehole at the nursery school to fetch water. The tank there is not linked to NAWEC water so the taste of that water is good,” Bojang said. “Even on days that the colour of NAWEC tap water is clear, the taste is still bad”.
And Modou Touray, a landlord, said the tap in his compound mostly supplies red-coloured water. “The kind of water that you get when you dig a new borehole and get water for the first time,” he said. “So I bought 15 empty 5-litre gallons that my children use to fetch water at the nursery school”.
The borehole at the nursery school that Bojang and Touray were referring to was privately dug. Many institutions and individuals now resort to private boreholes which are usually not fitted with water treatment facilities. Untreated water may contain bacteria, viruses and parasites which cause stomach cramps, pneumonia and other conditions.
A NAWEC staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of being disciplined for speaking to a journalist, confirmed that the company knew about Gunjur’s water problem.
In a recent US$43 million grant request to the World Bank, NAWEC said the boreholes and water tanks that it uses were built of steel in the 1960s and have deteriorated greatly over time, leading to corrosion and leakage of toxins into drinking water. In the grant request, the company admitted that it “does not have some essential tools necessary for it to run its water business properly”.