9 Nov 2011

Tuvalu working with donors to improve water storage following drought

5:10 pm on 9 November 2011

Help from international aid donors is being sought by the Tuvalu government as it endeavours to bolster the country's long term water storage capacity.

Tuvalu is emerging from months of severe drought which required de-salination units to be flown in.

Most of Tuvalu's atolls rely on collecting rainwater but the head of Tuvalu's national disaster committee, Pusinelli Laafai, says two recent surveys have shown how inefficient this process can be.

He says collection using roof guttering may be satisfactory but storage is a problem in many areas.

"Most of these things on some islands are not being well maintained. They often leak and they don't hold any water or not much water at all, and those are the things that we'd like to address, you know, including adding additional public huge storage reserves, storage tanks."