A natural spring in Trois-Rivières in the south of Guadeloupe, July 26, 2018. (AFP/Archives/Cedrick Isham CALVADOS)
Guadeloupe is known for its problems of access to water, but the lack and dilapidation of infrastructure also affects the sanitation network causing public health problems and endangering tourism when beaches are prohibited for swimming. .
“The networks are in such poor condition that wastewater and drinking water mix together”, even says Sabrina Cajoly, lawyer and human rights defender in Guadeloupe, very committed to this water issue. “On June 2, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged France to urgently guarantee the human right to drinking water and sanitation in Guadeloupe,” she says.
The very day of the arrival in Guadeloupe of the Secretary of State for Ecology Bérangère Couillard, Wednesday, visiting the archipelago in particular to ensure the “after-sales service of the Water-Dom plan”, according to those around him, a new area was prohibited for swimming, a river in the north of Basse-Terre.
According to a map dated 2021 from the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), of the 17 wastewater treatment plants in Guadeloupe, in particular the largest which each cover more than 2,000 inhabitants, “12 are non-compliant”, indicated an agent of the OFB. Mainly for reasons of the lack of self-monitoring incumbent on the communities in charge of the management of these stations.
At the beginning of the year, the director of the Office de l’Eau de Guadeloupe, confided to the press that he “made an inventory in 2021 which showed that around 80% of the sanitation systems in Guadeloupe were defective, whether we are talking about collective or non-collective”.
-“Time bomb” –
Local actors and observers of the issue have taken to qualifying the situation as a “time bomb”.
Emmanuel Macron visits a dilapidated pipeline repair site at Grands Fonds – les Abymes” in the suburbs of Pointe à Pitre, September 28, 2018 (POOL/AFP/Archives/Eliot BLONDET)
In October 2022, a report from the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese) alerted “on the pollution of coastal waters which risk being more and more often prohibited for swimming”.
However, for several months, bathing bans due to the presence of the Escherichia Coli bacterium have been increasing. And they also affect the rivers: very recently, one of them concerned the Ecrevisses waterfall and its river, a tourist hotspot in the archipelago.
If the tourism impact of these bans has not yet been measured, that of long-term pollution is already there.
“All the stations to the right of the discharge (station 50 m from the discharge) present an average to poor general state of ecological health (score of 3 to 5/5)”, thus described in 2020, a report from the Office water, on the “state of play of the main urban discharges into the sea”.
“This degradation results in a proliferation of macro-algae, siltation of the stations, in particular on the seagrass beds, the development of invasive phanerogams (aquatic plants, editor’s note), coral diseases and a high frequency of coral necrosis”, wrote the authors. of the report.
In its action plan announced at the start of the year, the Joint Syndicate for the Management of Water and Sanitation of Guadeloupe (SMGEAG) had planned for 2023 some 25 million euros, intended for sanitation, to initiate improvement. But this will take from concordant sources “many years and hundreds of millions of euros”.
Among many individuals, the suspicion concerning the quality of drinking water is strong: on the one hand because the bans on consuming tap water are regular in several municipalities, but also, because episodes of water contamination drinking with feces have occurred in the past.
A complaint, brought by a hundred plaintiffs, was also filed in the Pointe-à-Pitre court at the start of the year, for “offence of exposing others to an immediate risk of death”.
Solutions are being studied: a Caribbean experiment, called Caribsan, is attempting phyto-purification.
The first results ensure that the “vegetable filters have proven their effectiveness in Martinique, Guadeloupe and are being carried out in three other partner countries: Cuba, Dominica and Saint Lucia”, which are also experiencing serious problems of sanitation.
© 2023 AFP
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