Flaws

Marsh Harbor, Abaco, Bahamas
No LL

The store keeper in New Plymouth helped me to understand some of the inside view of island life. We talked just after an overnight thunderstorm. He asked how we rode out the storm on our boat. I asked if the homeowners weren't grateful for the rain to top off their cisterns.

You see, almost everyone living on places like Green Turtle Cay must get all their water from rain. They store it in cisterns. I asked how many gallons a family needs for a year. The store keeper told me that older houses in New Plymouth had smaller cisterns that store only 10,000 gallons (40 cubic meters).

New houses have flush toilets and washing machines, showers and the like and they need 30,000-40,000 gallons (150 cubic meters) per year. A wealthy man, living on the shore could make himself a solar powered RO (Reverse Osmosis) water desalinization system for $10-15K. That might be cost competitive with a cistern. However, water making systems are prone to frequent failures, thus some kind of backup would also be needed.

I asked about the big city cistern on the hill just at the edge of New Plymouth. He said, no, that is not in use any more. However, he said look at the ditch beside it. It is all dug and the equipment is all in place to make a RO city water system for the whole island. It was financed by the government. But alas, before it was installed, they had an election. The new government ministers don't know anything about projects in progress so they all get abandoned. Now, the new ministers are investigating importing fresh water from the USA by tanker. That sounds very expensive to me.

The store keeper told me more. He said that the Bahamas holds elections every five years, and that it is normal that all government projects in progress get dropped when the new ministers take their places. I imagine that it must be very frustrating. I also imagine that it must be at least partially the cause of seeing so many half finished abandoned projects in the Bahamas. I commented on that in an earlier blog.

I recall meeting the same problem years ago in my engineering career. In the 1970s, when I worked for PTI, we were hired by the Mexican federal utility to make an energy management system to help the operators to manage their national power grid. It was a low-ambition low-budget project. Nevertheless, it was big for PTI. I worked on it. We finished it, shipped it away to Mexico and sent an invoice to get paid; about $1 million if I remember right. They paid the bill, but questions and problem reports from the new system never came. Two years later, we learned that the held a new election there, and replaced government employees even down to the level of engineers. The new engineers never knew about this computer system that had been delivered. It sat on the loading dock at the railroad station until it rusted away.

The lesson is obvious. Having a 100% democratic form of government is not sufficient to make it effective and benevolent.