by Rod Hughes

Water service that had been cut by human stupidity and a landslide for four days was at last restored to nearly half million residents Sunday night. But the memory of having to scrounge water is bitter, especially to the residents of Coronado and Desamparados who had service restored only late Sunday night.

Some areas at least received water for a few hours to replenish home tanks and buckets before being shut down again. Others, like the above-mentioned suburbs, did not even get that. The CEO of the Water and Sewer Institute (A y A) Ricardo Sancho blandly promised that all would be normal by Monday afternoon, meaning that higher communities would be plagued by midday cessations of water service.

The trouble started early last week when a hamfisted backhoe operator nicked a main pipeline from a reservoir at Pitaya outside of Cartago. That was no sooner fixed than it was discovered that a landslide had severed an even larger water main at Coris outside Cartago. The damage to that main was even greater than the one that preceeded it.

The daily newspaper Al Dia reported some bitterness among residents, who are accustomed to the irresponsibility and inefficiency of government agencies generally. Costa Ricans, although notorious litterbugs, tend to be one of the personally cleanest nationalities on earth and become most upset when they cannot have their morning shower.

In the Los Guidos section of San Miguel de Desamparados (at the end of the water mains) a pipe broke and some grateful residents immediately began bathing, Al Dia reported. (Where that water came from the paper did not explain, since the faucets in homes were only making sucking noises.) Flor Cascante of Coronado told the paper that she and her neighbors felt A y A was playing around with them.

One of the problems facing the country is that A y A has no emergency capacity for using alternate water mains in case one is broken. The first administration of Oscar Arias mounted an initiative to overhaul the water system in the Central Valley which was in scandalous shape. At that time Arias predicted that potable water could be guaranteed until the year 2000. So it proved but, eight years past that limit, little has been done other than than to maintain the status quo and sometime even that ineptly.