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Dried up Amaila Falls vindicates opposition stance on project
– David Granger
The graphic image of a dried up Amaila Falls and Kuribrong River, vindicates the position held by A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) that the proposed 165MW project was badly conceived in the first place.
Leader of the political opposition party, David Granger, in an invited comment yesterday, said that the possibility of a dried up falls and river is the reason why APNU had called for a Potaro Basin Development Authority in the first place.
He said that such a body would have been equipped with the necessary skills that would have been able to properly analyze and predict weather patterns.
Granger said that the major flaw in the project design was to single out the Amaila site and Kuribrong River as the only source of water for the hydro electric plant.
An overhead view of the dried up Amaila Falls and Kuribrong River
According to Granger, there are a number of other sources of water in the Potaro basin that could have been diverted to the reservoir for the plant.
This would have allowed for a more stable supply of water that could facilitate an even larger plant.
He said, too, that a glaring example of the project being poorly conceived and implemented was the fact that at one point when the project was set to take off, there were still surveys being conducted.
Granger was making reference to the plane that had crashed on a Plaisance home which had been contracted by Sithe Global.
The American registered aircraft, a twin-engine Piper Aztec with registration number N27-FT, was on a technical survey mission for the Amaila Falls project.
Granger suggested that there is a need for a project that supplies much more than the proposed 165MW hence the need for a more guaranteed supply of water for the project.
The Opposition leader said that the availability of water from the Kuribrong River for the Amaila Falls project is but one aspect of the concerns surrounding the project.
Granger said that the Amaila Falls location could very well still be the best location for the project but this has to be verified and backed up with solid data that could have been put together by the proposed Potaro Basin Development Authority.
He said that the opposition is also concerned about the costs, transmission line and the building of the road among other aspects of the project.
The Amaila Falls which was intended to supply the nation with 165MW of electricity and save Guyana millions of US dollars is at present, bone dry.
Public Works Minister, Robeson Benn, said that it is not unusual for waterfalls used to provide hydroelectricity to run dry. He pointed to power stations in Suriname and in Brazil.
He said that the contractors would have built a dam that would have stored water to smoothen the flow regime. The dam would have given rise to a reservoir which would have been used to regulate the flow of water for the hydro.
Minister Benn also explained that in times of heavy rainfall, the excess water would have been released through gates. He insisted that had there been a dam, the extent of dryness at this time would not have been as severe.
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