By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

THE Navy has scheduled an 18-hour shutdown of its water treatment plant for system upgrades and has asked southern residents to practice water conservation.
The outage will commence at 7 a.m. tomorrow, with Agat and Santa Rita expected to be the villages most affected by the plant shutdown.
The Navy public affairs office said the Navy is working closely with the Guam Waterworks Authority and village mayors to minimize or eliminate any plant shutdown impact on residents.
During this outage, the Navy will be requiring its housing residents and other users to adhere to strict water conservation measures.
According to the Navy, these conservation measures are being implemented in an attempt to conserve water within the Navy’s reservoir tanks used to supply water to Guam’s electrical plants at Cabras, Piti and Tanguisson, firefighting systems, and U.S. Naval Hospital Guam.  
During the Navy’s previous maintenance work on Fena, the impact on residents was minimal as the outages were shorter.
The Navy said this scheduled outage is necessary to facilitate the Navy water treatment plant upgrades, which will improve treatment processes, modernize process control instrumentation, and provide redundancy.
According to GWA, the outage for maintenance on the Fena clearwell will affect the villages of Agat and Santa Rita on Saturday evening.
“We do not anticipate being able to keep water flowing through the villages from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. or Saturday evening to Sunday morning,” GWA public information officer Heidi Ballendorf said.
To minimize inconvenience, GWA is advising residents in the affected areas to start storing water as early as possible.