By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

THE Navy has scheduled a series of shutdowns of its water treatment plant starting at 8 a.m. on Monday.
Follow-on shutdowns of the plant are scheduled for 8 a.m., Feb. 28, March 2, March 5 and March 7.
According to the Navy’s public affairs office, production at the facility will be offline for approximately eight hours during each shutdown to support ongoing plant upgrades.
Residents of Agat and Santa Rita may be affected by the plant being offline but the Guam Waterworks Authority is expected to fill up its storage tanks in order to minimize inconvenience to water consumers.
According to GWA public information officer Heidi Ballendorf, GWA may also send mobile water tanks to help residents in the affected areas.
The Navy is working closely with GWA and village mayors during these upgrades to minimize negative impacts and to ensure residents are promptly notified.
Updates will be provided over the course of these outages.
The Navy assured that water from the Navy’s reservoir tanks will continue to supply Guam’s electrical plants at Cabras, Piti and Tanguisson. as well as essential firefighting systems and U.S. Naval Hospital Guam.
The shutdowns have been scheduled over a period of several days to allow for sufficient recovery of stored water and to minimize the inconvenience to customers.
However, both the Navy and GWA are cautioning consumers to conserve water during the scheduled water outage days.
According to the Navy, the scheduled outages are necessary to facilitate Navy Water Treatment Plant upgrades, which will improve treatment processes and modernize process control instrumentation.
The end result of the upgrades is expected to be better, more reliable water service to Navy customers.
Earlier this month, the Navy also conducted maintenance at its water treatment plant but completed the work earlier than scheduled, preventing what could have been a three-day water outage for the south.