Recent problems with toilet-flushing in St. George's are soon to be over, the Old Town corporation has promised.

Lance Furbert, town manager for the Corporation of St. George's, said he hoped the water problems would be solved over the weekend - enabling people to flush their toilets properly again.

He said many homes in St. George's relied solely on the town's sanitary water tank for flushing their toilets, and so had faced problems during the last few days when the tank system broke down.

As a result, they had to resort to using buckets of water to flush.

However, the lucky residents who had an option of using their own water tanks for flushing, as well as the corporation's, were able to simply switch over and suffered no inconvenience.

"It's been off for about a week now because, unfortunately, we have had problems with the sanitary water system," said Mr. Furbert.

"Most homes have a fresh water system, as well, so they could simply switch over. But the real problem was for people who did not have that option.

"But we are taking steps over the weekend to get a new pump in, which had to be flown in from New Jersey. That will be put in place, so, hopefully, by Monday people will have flushing water again in the town."

Mr. Furbert said there were around 1,600 homes in St. George's and he gauged that between 800 and 900 homes had been affected.

However, he also said the corporation was considering changing the sanitary water system next year, reverting to the old gravity system that was in place years' ago.

That system worked where the water was pumped up to the tank and then fed by gravity to the town.

He added: "We are going to go back to that system early next year, if we can. We want to bring in an engineer to design the system for us, but we are taking our time doing it. That is our plan, at the moment."