Bullet Tree Residents Without Water Amidst Heat Wave  

Residents of Bullet Tree Village in the Cayo District say they have been having water issues for quite some time. They say that they have no idea what to do as they have had limited to no access to potable water for over a month. One resident, Dale Holder, told News Five that the village might be facing this problem due to development and population expansion. He says that the village is supplied with water through a pump that is connected to a reserve. Holder says he has been without water for the past two weeks.

 

Dale Holder, Resident, Bullet Tree Village
“We’ve had water issues ever since I’ve moved here. That’s just normal. I found in Belize.  And, you know, the whole area has water issues. But they have developed a new area here next to the village, the government has, and they expanded. So before they did the expansion, they put new system up on the hill, put new tanks and everything. And since they’re developing the other areas around here, the people here have lost some of the water supply. And I hear different things about they don’t have a pump big enough to pump now. And I tried to catch up with the local chairman. And I finally called, caught up with him later this afternoon, just around noon and he said he would meet with me. Because I’m trying to find out from him and secondhand, I’ve never been able to catch up on him and return my calls for some reason, but the new area, there’s quite a few people. I don’t know how many is over in that area now, five hundred to one thousand people. And the very first part of the new area is getting water from what I understand. And other than that, they aren’t getting any water. We lucked out the first night, must have been Saturday night. We got about fifty gallons of water. But I stayed up all night to get that and to haul it up. But, you know, we are getting some. There’s other people that aren’t getting any. We are getting some now. I’ve been able to pump up a few times to the storage tank. The other people in the village don’t have access to an additional pump or anything, and they don’t have no water. It’s dry right now, a lot of them collect water, and they have water for a haul, but the area person here does a lot of the hauling water. He’s broke solid, he couldn’t even get to me because I needed water and we were out. And so it’s becoming a problem for the local people that we can’t get water. Unless they can go to, you know, the river and get it themselves and bring it back.”