MONROVIA, Montserrado – Pipe-borne water has been restored to parts of Monrovia after a major outage that lasted for more than a week.

According to the Liberia Water Sewer Corporation, the outage came about as a result of the damage to the 36-inch pipe that runs from the LWSC White Plains Water Treatment Plant.

LWSC supplies water from its White Plains facility through two routes, using 16-inch and 36-inch pipes.

The 16-inch pipe runs from White Plains through the township of Louisiana and supplies Caldwell, Duala, New Kru Town, Clara Town, and Via Town. The 36-inch pipe runs through Paynesville, Congo Town, Sinkor, and Central Monrovia.

Health facilities, foreign embassies, government ministries and agencies, business and learning institutions as well as ordinary Liberians went days without water.

The homes of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Vice President Joseph Nyumah Boakai were not exempt from the water outage.

To have water in both the homes of Sirleaf and Boakai during the outage, LWSC trucked water for several days to their homes while its technicians tried to repair the damaged pipe, according to a high-ranking individual within the organization who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

The source described the recent water outage as “a major water outage,” adding that the serious nature of the situation prompted the president to visit the LWSC White Plains facility on Saturday, July 22.

Kimmie Weeks, LWSC’s board chairman, posted on his Facebook page on July 17 that certain parts of Monrovia would not have running water due to a failure of one of the major transmission lines. The announcement came four days into the outage.

LWSC workers and contractors repair a damaged pipe. Photo courtesy of Kimmie Weeks.

According to Weeks, LWSC was working around the clock to repair the damaged pipe.

On Sunday, July 23, Weeks again posted an update that water had now been restored to Monrovia, noting that “it may take a few hours for water to reach to certain areas.”

Weeks advised customers to let their taps run for a minute as the first batch of water might not be clean.

Featured photo by Zeze Ballah