Five years ago, a government planning office survey found 1,700 houses in the two-mile-long-by-500-feet wide strip of islands that comprise the main urban center of Majuro. A survey completed this week shows that number has skyrocketed to 2,381 dwellings — a more than 30 percent increase.
But aside from the increasing urban crowding, Planning Office Director Carl Hacker is worried that a large number of these homes have no or little fresh water storage capacity. This is critical, he said, on an island that depends nearly 100 percent on rain for its fresh water. The government’s water company pumps water to urban residents only twice a week, eight hours each on Mondays and Fridays to conserve the limited amount of fresh water supplies.
Hacker said 548 of these urban homes — about one in four — do not have any kind of catchment tank or water storage capacity, and many more have inadequate storage for the average household size of eight.
“I know we will also have a fairly large number of households with limited capacity given the number of people in some households,” Hacker said. “It would certainly appear based on these very preliminary findings that the water situation at the household level could be very much more severe than was originally realized. I was expecting a number that was about half of what we are seeing now.”
Hacker said the new data from this housing survey shows why “we have some of the water borne illness problems that we see in the field and in the numbers (from Majuro Hospital).”
Hacker’s office is overseeing European Union funding for water improvements, including the provision of a supply of household water catchments that aims to alleviate some of the water storage problem.
Hacker expressed optimism about addressing these water problems. “We can do something about this” he said.
Hacker said the “information from the house-listing and the water survey will go a long way toward helping us identify the scope of the problem and develop practical solutions.”
