HARARE City Council has announced plans to rehabilitate water reticulation pipes that are compromising the quality of water in parts of the city.
BY OBEY MANAYITI
Speaking at the Morton Jaffray water treatment plant where the site is being upgraded using part of the $144 million loan from China, acting water manager engineer Tapiwa Kunyadini said although they were almost 70% complete with upgrading the treatment plant, it was also necessary to look at the water pipes.
Several Harare residents toured the treatment plant yesterday to get an appreciation of how far the $144 million loan had gone in solving the city’s water crisis.
“Water being produced from Prince Edward and Morton Jaffray is perfect, but we should remember that our pipe systems were put in place when those suburbs were being built and they were using mostly steel pipes and asbestos pipes,” Kunyadini said.
“You would find out that most of them have the developed rust and this changes colour of the water. We need our system to be constantly changed and we hope when we complete this project, we will expand into those areas.
“We have to rehabilitate the system. Some lines were done in 1954, they are old and there is need for new lines.”
Kunyadini said they were still waiting for disbursement of more funds to complete the works.
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He said at the moment, the city was producing 450 million litres of water a day although the capacity of the Morton Jaffray plant is 604 million litres a day.
“With the rehabilitation done so far, we can produce 520 million litres a day, but we are producing 450 million litres due to logistics in chemicals supply. If we manage to get our constant supply we can run 520 million litres a day.
“We can only reach the 520 if the outstanding works are completed. The approximate demand for Harare metro, because we supply city of Harare, Norton and Chitungwiza, Epworth and Ruwa, the demand is 800 million litres a day. The demand is still quite high,” Kunyadini said.
Residents expressed concern over the slowness on Harare’s side to solve the water crisis.
