The completion of the project would now see the plant produce 196 million litres of water per day up from only 82 million litres produced previously.

 

Minister for Water and Irrigation, Eng Gerson Lwenge, said with the completion of the project, a total of 586 million litres of water would be produced for the city since the Lower Ruvu Water Treatment Plant now produces 390 million litres.

 

This means the total production would now exceed the water need for the city which currently stands at about 400 million litres per day. "This is a big step ahead in ending water woes in the city," Minister Lwenge said after visiting the project site on Friday.

 

"Since we are now going to pump more water to the city dwellers, now we need to focus on improving water supply network because a large amount of water has been lost due to poor water supply infrastructures," he said.

 

However, he said the challenge was that the new water pumps installed at the Upper Ruvu Water Treatment plant needed 400KV of power to run up from the current power of 200KV at the centre. Ho noted that plans were under way to ensure that more power was available within the next two months to run the pumps.

 

The project which is part of the augmentation of Dar es Salaam Water Supply Scheme being funded by Exim Bank of India started on February 2014. The bank provided 178 million US dollars (about Sh372.7bn/-) for the expansion of the plant, lying pipes from the plant to the tanks for supply and repairing water supply network in the city.

 

A total of 39 million US dollars (about 83.85bn/-) was spent on the expansion of the Upper Ruvu alone, 59.3 million US dollars for construction of the pipes and tanks for supplying the water. According to Minister Lwenge, a large part of the funds would now go to finance the ongoing project of rehabilitating water supply network in the city.

Source : allafrica.com