BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – INCREASED rainfall over the past few weeks has put St. Kitts in better stead to combat the dry spell being experienced by countries within the Caribbean region.
In mid-February the St. Kitts Water Department issued a press release indicating that the Federation is among territories stretching from Jamaica in the north to Venezuela in the South that are experiencing an unusually dry season.
It explained that specific to St. Kitts, the “dry spell” was owing to the decline in or the lack of rainfall.
The Department took a proactive stance and encouraged all to do their part in conserving water, and warned if it is not conserved the situation would graduate to drought status which would result in rationing.
Since the issuance of that release, St. Kitts has been blessed with periods of rainfall and according to the Meteorological Office (Met Office) located at the Robert L. Bradshaw International Airport, rainfall for the year has totalled almost eight inches.
The Met Office disclosed that in February 2010, between 8:00 a.m. on the 24th and 2:00 p.m. the following day, 2.76 inches of rain was recorded. Prior to that, however, a miniscule 0.02 inches was recorded and a total of 2.78 inches of rainfall recorded for that month.
Further disclosed by the Met Office is that up to yesterday (Mar. 18), rainfall sat just below the four-inch mark.
Between March 7 and 8, 1.75 inches of rainfall was recorded with 0.68 inches being recorded on March 10 and 0.78 being recorded on March 11. On March 12, a further 0.71 inches was recorded.
SKNVibes understands that although St. Kitts is experiencing a “dry spell”, the island has managed to surpass the average rainfall recorded over the past 30 years. The average rainfall for January-March, according to the Met Office, is 6.81 inches (2.44 for January, 2.32 for February and 2.05 for March). This year, 1.22 inches of rains was recorded in January, 2.78 in February and 3.99 in March.
Manager and Water Engineer of the St. Kitts Water Department, Cromwell Williams said the welcomed showers have placed St. Kitts in a more “comfortable” position “in terms of water that we are receiving from our sources and in terms of what we are able to maintain in storage”.
He however cautioned that “that does not mean that we are to let down our guards and not continue to conserve water, because the general forecast is that this would be a dryer than normal dry season and we just don’t know exactly what the next weeks could hold. So, in terms of going forward, we still ought to exercise restraint…”
The Water Manager explained that the improved situation could regress at any given time and because the future remains yet unknown, he reiterated the importance of being continually proactive.
“But for us…it depends on what happens in the future, because before we started to raise the alarm around mid-February, at the time we had received practically no rainfall for February...so we had begun to see a vast decline in our flows…So we raised the alarm. Fortunately, we got some rain soon after that and we got some again, but for us, it’s still a monitoring process.”
