Residents of the Havana municipalities of Arroyo Naranjo, Cotorro, and San Miguel del Padrón heard this Friday an explanation from the official press of the Cuban regime, according to which the prolonged water shortage they are experiencing is a result of "adverse weather conditions."
Official journalist Bernardo Espinosa, known for his daily appearances to disseminate news from the Electric Union of Cuba (UNE), reported for the National Television News on the work being done for comprehensive maintenance on lines and on an electrical substation that supplies the water supply systems to the population of those municipalities.
According to their report, the water supply issues experienced by their neighbors are due to frequent disruptions "after electrical failures caused by adverse weather conditions."
"This is the most difficult time for us in our electrical networks. It is a time when the meteorological impact is very strong on them, which causes deterioration in the lines and also leads to countless electrical interruptions," asserted engineer Luis Rodríguez Vargas, technical director of the Electric Company of Havana.
However, far from showing the infrastructures affected by the "weather impact," the report focused on fixing leaks and outflows in the pipes that carry water, showing the intervention of excavators and work crews to replace the affected sections.
In addition to pruning trees and replacing cables and insulation, the joint intervention of the company Aguas de La Habana and the Electric Company of the capital had "everything necessary," according to executives from both state-owned companies.
"We have changed insulation in six structures, we have changed insulation, we have installed new conductors... The country, uh, the Electric Union has made a supreme effort to provide us with the resources needed for the scale of this work that we have organized and planned, and everything is going as expected," said Rodríguez Vargas.
For his part, engineer Guillermo Lamela Aragonés, director of inspection and supervision at the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources, explained that they were "eliminating significant leaks that exist in the 800mm pipeline that runs from the well fields of Los Benignos to the pump station of Loma del Cielo and supplies half of the municipality of San Miguel del Padrón."
“This would allow for an improvement in the supply service, reducing route losses and achieving stability in the municipality, with the aspiration of offering service every other day as it was about 5 months ago,” added the executive.
"Work is being done very hard, very hard in Havana. Not a minute is being lost," assured engineer Mariolys Guilar Ferrer, deputy director of aqueducts and maintenance at the company Aguas de La Habana.
Present at the works, the General Secretary of the Central Workers' Union of Cuba (CTC, the only legal union in the country), Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, emphasized that the actions being undertaken "directly aim to ensure a growth of 50 liters per second in the water flows being pumped from this area. And that will directly impact a greater level of the population receiving the service with quality."
Blackouts and water supply in Havana: The new front opened by the UNE
Since the intensification of the water supply crisis in the capital, the UNE has been pointed out as responsible for the problems with water supply due to interruptions in the electrical flow.
According to the company Aguas de La Habana, blackouts cause breakdowns in the facilities that supply water to the Cuban capital, resulting in several municipalities stopping receiving the service.
In recent days, the lack of electrical power caused a breakdown in the 78-inch pipeline of Cuenca Sur and two others in the 1000 pipeline of PAD. According to Aguas de La Habana, their workers worked “all evening, night, early morning, and dawn at the site until [finding] a solution.”
At the end of July, a blackout in the transmission lines supplying the Cuenca Sur water supply field destroyed the pipeline and left half of Havana without water.
At that time, the company Aguas de La Habana explained that the lack of electric current had caused a sudden total interruption of the pumping, which in turn had resulted in several "water hammer" effects in the main pipeline of that source, causing it to collapse in three places.
It is hard to understand that water could cause "water hammer" in a pipeline through which water is not being pumped, since a power outage left a water pump without electricity. But that's how Aguas de La Habana explained it, placing the ultimate responsibility on the power outage.
At the beginning of September, the president of the Water and Sanitation Business Group, José Antonio Hernández Álvarez, acknowledged that the water supply is in a critical situation in Cuba but assured that the main problem is the continuous blackouts that cause failures in the pumping system.
Hernández Álvarez insisted that the crisis of the National Electro-Energy System (SEN), with multiple breakdowns in the main thermoelectric plants, is one of the key factors that exacerbate the water supply problem.
Power outages disrupt the operation of pumping equipment, and when the electrical service is restored, it can take up to four hours to pressurize the system and resume normal water distribution, the executive explained.
In other words, the blackouts cause both "water hammer" and "depressurization" of the water pipes. The confusion of both state companies is consistent with the chaos that reigns in the government of the so-called "continuity" of Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Currently, more than 600,000 Cubans are without access to drinking water. The situation is especially complex in Havana, where more than 130,000 people have been affected by this issue for days.
At the beginning of September, residents of San Miguel del Padrón, desperate and outraged by the lack of water for more than two weeks, went out to protest and blocked the streets of their neighborhoods.
Dozens of residents from the La Rosita and Siboney neighborhoods gathered in the streets early in the evening for spontaneous demonstrations. On the Calzada de Güines, the crowd, including children, stood in the road and blocked the passage of cars and buses.
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