With the Corporate Area’s main reservoirs below 40 per cent of capacity, questions in Parliament about where trucked water comes from have exposed how much Jamaican households now rely on a trade that the national water utility does not oversee.
KINGSTON, Jamaica, 8 October 2026, Members of Parliament have raised concerns that some households buying trucked water during Jamaica’s drought may be receiving water that does not come from safe, treated supplies, as the National Water Commission (NWC) prepares to tighten piped supply in the Corporate Area.
The concerns were aired at Tuesday’s sitting of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, the Gleaner reported. The MP for St Elizabeth South Eastern said irrigation water collected from National Irrigation Commission loading bays is sometimes sold for domestic use in severe droughts. The MP for St James Central said he had seen trucks drawing water from springs and other sources that could not be verified, and that people in urgent need often do not ask where the water came from. The MP for St Andrew West Rural said some operators fill up at public standpipes, which taxpayers fund, and then sell the water on to NWC customers at significant prices.
Who checks the trucks?
Pressed by the committee’s chairman on whether any agency regulates water truckers, an NWC vice-president said the Commission regulates only the contractors it engages, whose trucks must be inspected and sterilised among other requirements. Trucking from other sources would fall under public health requirements, he said, and the NWC cannot set the prices operators charge consumers.
That leaves an uneven picture. The NWC’s own certification covers only the trucks it hires, while other operators are left to general public health rules, and the sitting heard no account of how those rules are enforced when water is sold door to door. In communities where the pipes run dry, households weigh the price they will pay against water whose origin they cannot easily confirm.
Reservoirs below 40 per cent
The pressure on supply is severe. The NWC’s acting corporate public relations manager told Radio Jamaica on Monday that the Hermitage Dam stood at 39.3 per cent of capacity and the Mona Reservoir at 32.9 per cent. The Commission’s chief spokesman told the Gleaner that Mona was above 60 per cent at this time last year and at 98 per cent the year before, while Hermitage was full a year ago.
The Commission says it will move parts of Kingston and St Andrew from daily supply to an alternating schedule, with different areas receiving water on different days to improve pressure. Its spokesman told Radio Jamaica there was no sense in giving everyone the same supply window when half the network does not get water, and told the Gleaner that targeted supply times would be published by the end of this week. If conditions worsen, some locations may be taken off the main schedule altogether. At the start of October, the Jamaica Observer reported that 107 of the NWC’s 405 systems were in drought conditions and that daily production had fallen from about 199 million to 188 million gallons, leaving an islandwide shortfall of 10 million to 15 million gallons.
Business calls for a reset
The Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) has framed the problem as one of planning rather than weather. In a statement reported by the Gleaner on Tuesday, it acknowledged that the Government is investing, including in the US$92 million Rio Cobre water treatment plant and the Western Parishes water programme, and has plans to look at expanding Hermitage and Mona and replacing the Yallahs pipeline. But it questioned whether the scale, financing and timelines of those projects will meet future demand, noting that Jamaica has faced water restrictions and drought pressures over the past two decades. It argued that water must become part of development planning and that resilience by individual Jamaicans cannot indefinitely substitute for national infrastructure.
Losses compound the shortage. The Observer reported that non-revenue water, water the NWC produces but does not bill, largely because of leaks and theft, accounts for about 70 per cent of supply islandwide. The Commission aims to cut that to 30 per cent, but the programme is still in procurement, with auditing and initial works expected to begin around 2027 to 2028.
Water as a property question
For homeowners and buyers, the drought is a reminder that how a property copes when the mains fail can matter as much as its location. Storage tanks, pumps and rainwater capture all carry costs, and households without them are the ones most exposed when they have to buy water by the truckload from suppliers whose sources they cannot check.
For developers and planners, the PSOJ’s argument raises practical questions. New housing in the Corporate Area draws on the same strained network as existing homes, and repeated dry seasons invite scrutiny of how far new schemes provide their own storage, and of whether large approvals are weighed against available bulk water capacity.
The immediate test is whether rain reaches the watersheds and whether the NWC’s revised schedule, once published, holds. The longer test is regulatory. If trucked water has become a regular part of how Jamaican homes are supplied, the question raised at the committee is whether it should be held to clear standards on source and safety rather than left as an emergency stopgap with oversight split between agencies.
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