Nine Months Without Water: A Trelawny Councillor Says Only Protests Will Get NWC’s Attention

• Daniel Town and Texas lost water when Melissa hit
• Residents pay $8,000 per truckload since October
• A councillor says protest may be the only fix
• NWC cites two specific projects now under way

Residents of Daniel Town and Texas in Trelawny have been without piped water since Hurricane Melissa struck in October 2025, nine months of relying on trucked and purchased water while the National Water Commission works to restore service. One resident, Shawna McKay, described the situation to the Gleaner as a disgrace: All you get is excuses. I have to be purchasing water at $8,000 per load.

Councillor for the Martha Brae Division Roydell Hamilton went further, suggesting the community may need to escalate before NWC responds meaningfully. Until people come out with placards in a demonstration, then NWC will treat the people how they deserve, he said, a councillor’s own assessment that routine complaint channels have not been sufficient to move the utility.

NWC Communications Manager Delano Williams pointed to two specific infrastructure projects as the actual fix in progress: a Relift Station at Rock, scheduled to begin that week, and restoration work on the Daniel Town Tank, which once completed would enable pumping to Texas and other elevated areas nearby. Both projects target the physical mechanism behind the outage, moving water uphill to elevated communities, rather than simply extending the trucking programme residents have relied on since the storm.

The Trelawny case sits inside a broader drought and infrastructure strain affecting the island well beyond storm-damaged communities. Kingston and St Andrew customers served by the Mona Dam, then at 62 percent capacity, moved to scheduled restrictions in August, with the Water Resources Authority separately warning that river flows had fallen sharply compared with both earlier in the year and the same period in 2025, reducing an alternative source many households lean on when piped supply fails. Kingston and St Andrew require roughly 40 million gallons daily; production at the time was running at about half that.

None of that broader strain explains why two specific Trelawny communities went nine full months without any piped water at all, a duration well beyond ordinary drought restrictions. For McKay and her neighbours, the relevant timeline is not the island’s water year but their own: October to July, and counting, on trucked water at $8,000 a load.

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