Plans for closer water system for Gill-Breeze
It's no secret of what the residents of the Gill Breeze Subdivision have had to endure, but they continue to hold on to hope some improvement will be made.
By KUAM NewsGuam - You may have experienced a water outage once or twice in the past week, month or even a year - now imagine having one for over a decade. It's no secret of what the residents of the Gill Breeze Subdivision have had to endure, but they continue to hold on to hope some improvement will be made.
Yigo resident Lindy Etpison has been living in the Gill Breeze Subdivision for close to a decade, and life up north has been anything but breezy. Etpison is one of 31 families living in the Gill Breeze Subdivision and although coming from different walks of life, they all share one thing in common- they haven't had running water for nearly ten years.
She said, "The most problem that we're facing is the water and then the road…when you came up, you can see the road is a rocky road. And we're using our cars to get water and we put our drums in the back of our truck. Even though some of us have a truck, but some they don't, so they're getting one gallon of water, and they have a small car to drive up, and it's kind of heavy and breaking the shacks for our car and we've been suffering for long enough."
From a one gallon container up to a 200-gallon drum, the Yigo Mayor's Office has authorized Gill Breeze residents for years to collect water from the Yigo Baseball Field to bring back to their homes. At least twice a week, Eptison will collect a weeks worth of water; however when its dry season or sunny out, she'll make a third trip out. "Now that the kids are in school, it's kind of having hard time, because we have to wash the kids uniform and the kids are using water to shower and go to school," she said.
And although the road won't necessarily be fixed tomorrow, the Yigo Mayor's Office is working on providing a water source closer to Gill Breeze residents. Following a public meeting last night, Yigo mayor Robert Lizama hopes to work with the Guam Waterworks Authority to ensure some progress. "So with that, they are going to provide the water source out of the fire hydrant that is there set in place and they are going to hook up a water pipe and at the same time, they would have to apply for a meter, but we have over 30 families that are up there so who's going to apply for the water," he said.
Lizama says he's willing to apply for the meter for Gill Breeze leaving its residents the responsibility of payment. And just as a groundbreaking was held earlier this week for a road project leading into another of the developer's projects, the Gill Baza Subdivision, he hopes the government can learn from its past errors. "That any type of development be it a housing development or a development that involves leasing out lot for lot, that they seriously look at the infrastructure and ensuring that when we're going to allow families to reside there, the very lease is to have water," he said.
However, Eptison can't understand how the developer would leave residents without one of life's basic necessities, saying, "If it were him who were staying here, like us that are suffering and we're paying our lot monthly and faithfully paying, and he's just sitting down at his office collecting all the money and he don't care about us as long as he get the money, and for us we're still suffering with our kids to get the water."
CCU chairman Simon Sanchez meanwhile told KUAM today that the long standing issue is a failure of the developer Francis Gill to put the infrastructure in for the residents of gill breeze and estimates it to cost $3 million to put in a water system. You may recall gill was convicted in the 1990's for a land scam case, but in 2002 he was pardoned by then-governor Carl Gutierrez.