Major Project to Provide More Water for Portmore and Spanish Town

Within the next 20 years, the National Water Commission (NWC) is projecting that it will provide an additional nine million gallons of water to its customers in the Portmore and Greater Spanish Town regions on a daily basis.
The expected increase in water output will result from the second phase of the NWC’s Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) Water Supply Project, which is designed to address water supply deficiencies in the South East St. Catherine and Greater Spanish Town areas. Project Manager of the KMA initiative, Garth Jackson, informs JIS News that by next month, the first construction contract to undertake rehabilitation exercises on well sources, pumping stations, and distribution reservoirs in the designated areas, is to be awarded.

SPANISH TOWN WATER TREATMENT PLANT – Sedimentation Basin to be rehabilitated

“We are hoping to award that by the beginning of October, and after the preliminary arrangements for mobilising a contractor, we anticipate that construction will start before the end of this year,” he adds.
Slated for extensive upgrading by the NWC in the two targeted regions are: 10 distribution service reservoirs, 12 wells, 19 pumping station buildings, and the Spanish Town water treatment plant. Furthermore, some 18 kilometres of old pipes within the town centre of Spanish Town are to be replaced.
Mr. Jackson indicates that the general renovation is necessary as most of the facilities are at least 40 years old, while the ones in South East St. Catherine were installed in the mid-1990s.
“Essentially, what we are looking at is electro-mechanical equipment which has a life of five to 10 years in general. The bore hole themselves are all over 40 years old, and the Spanish town treatment plant is probably closer to 50 years old ,” he notes.
While conceding that the present state of the facilities is less than ideal, the Project Manager tells JIS News: “I wouldn’t say they are in a deplorable condition.they are at the stage where they need major rehabilitation. Usually, what we have been doing over the years would have been repair and minor upgrading, but what is needed now is comprehensive rehabilitation”.
“The facilities are operational but the efficiencies of the electro-mechanical equipment would be low, because of their age, and the fact that no major upgrading has been done over the life of the stations, then those need to be looked at,” he explains.
This project, which is being jointly financed by the Government and the Japan Bank for International Co-operation (JBIC) at a cost of US$83 million, aims to successfully facilitate the anticipated increase in the carrying capacity of water supplied to south east St. Catherine from its current demand of 14 to 20 million gallons per day, and from 10 to 12 million gallons in Greater Spanish Town by the year 2026.
The overall project is divided into three components – rehabilitation of existing facilities; the development of new sources of water supply; and supplementary activities to ensure sustainable operations.
In the project’s current phase, Mr. Jackson points out the primary objective of the rehabilitation contract is improvement in the reliability of supply within the specified areas. “We anticipate that at the end of the rehabilitation, there will be less breakdown of our equipment and therefore there will not be interruption in service. Of course, where there is inadequate water resources due to drought or other conditions, then you could still have a problem, but essentially, you should have a more reliable supply,” the Project Manager says.
“We are also carrying out a reconfiguration of the sources of supply to ensure that the water resource, meaning the groundwater resource and the surface water resource, is actually developed in a more sustainable manner,” he adds.
During the design phase of the water supply project, he advises JIS News that, “one of the issues which we took a long time to analyse and decide on.is how to ensure that there is no over abstraction of ground water, that in effect we have a regime which is sustainable in the long term; so we had to reallocate the abstraction from a number of our wells, reduce it from a number of wells which were vulnerable to either quality contamination from saline intrusion, and reallocate that reduced abstraction to other wells, which are not as vulnerable to contamination”.
The re-examination process, he explains, was necessary as, “we are looking at the reliability of 24-hour production. We are looking at the long term sustainability and we are also including a number of additional purification facilities to improve the disinfection operations, in order to ensure that the water quality is maintained at the highest level, so it is a combination of short term reliability, long term sustainability, and quality that we hope to achieve from this”.
Already, some US$10 million has been expended under the project, which for the most part, was allocated towards institutional strengthening activities. Mr. Jackson explains that several activities undertaken during the period were meant to improve the NWC’s capabilities to address operational issues within the company.
“We looked at the non-revenue water.which is one of our major issues, the water loss, or non-revenue water situation. We selected a particular area in the project environs and did a pilot study there, that is Hellshire, and we were able to reduce the unaccounted water there by a significant amount and we used the results of that pilot to expand it to the broader project area, and eventually that will be expanded to the broader islandwide operations,” he informs.
The Hellshire pilot project, he continues, served “to diagnose the situation within NWC, the issues, the problems that NWC is facing and the corporate solutions and the recommended plan of action which would be implemented over a phased period”.
Besides the Hellshire project, the NWC also undertook the North Western Parishes Project, an initiative similar to Hellshire’s, which looked at commercial and physical losses to the utility company and ways to improve the coverage of metered services as well as how best to address the issue of aged pipes. The institutional strengthening aspect of the project also examined operation and maintenance issues, customer service, training, and the technological improvements which covered Geography Information System (GIS), Management Information System (MIS), and asset management.
Mr. Jackson points out that at the conclusion of the NWC’s study of its internal operations, “we put together a comprehensive three-year work plan to upgrade the various functions within the organisation by implementing certain improvement measures”.