By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

AFTER suffering from water outages during the weekend, southern areas are expected to suffer more inconvenience as the Navy continues upgrades to its water treatment plant.
The Navy has scheduled a shutdown of its water treatment plant for three days commencing at 8 a.m. on Feb. 2.
Residents of Agat, Santa Rita, and Nimitz Hill will be affected by the plant being offline.
Additionally, the Navy’s water reservoir tanks will be affected during the outage due to the lack of replenishment normally provided by the treatment plant.
In order to mitigate the impact of this outage, the Navy will be requiring its housing residents to adhere to strict water conservation measures beginning Thursday and continuing throughout the weekend.
According to the Navy’s public affairs office, Navy housing residents have also been advised of potential water outages over the weekend that may result from low reservoir tank levels.
Water from the Navy’s water reservoir tanks will continue to provide support to Guam’s electrical plants at Cabras, Piti and Tanguisson, firefighting systems, and the Naval Hospital.
According to the Navy’s public affairs office, the scheduled outage is necessary to facilitate Navy water treatment plant upgrades, which will improve treatment processes, modernize process control instrumentation, and provide redundancy. The end result of the upgrades is expected to be a better, more reliable water service to Navy customers.
The Navy has been working closely with the Guam Waterworks Authority and village mayors during the renovations in an attempt to minimize negative impacts and to ensure residents are promptly notified of upcoming water outages. The Navy said daily updates will be provided during this outage.
GWA has already apologized for last weekend’s water service interruption in the south.
On Jan. 26, there was a water main break in Santa Rita in the Santa Rosa area that affected Pale Ferdinand Way.
According to GWA public information officer Heidi Ballendorf, approximately 100 homes had no water.
By Saturday, water was restored to most of those homes. However, the Cross Island Road and Nambo Falls area continued to be without water due to the Senefa Tank reservoir which was completely empty by Saturday afternoon.
GWA crews were able to remedy the situation Sunday afternoon, but several residents in the higher elevations were still experiencing low to no water pressure.
GWA general manager David Craddick was on the scene Sunday working to address the problem and is continuing to monitor the water situation in the area.
Ballendorf said GWA will be issuing further information as it works to correct the problem.