ADDIS ABABA (HAN) November 9.2016.Public Diplomacy & Regional Security News. By Bezawit Admasu. The project will stretch 16Km pipeline and ten anarobic battelled reactor
The City of Addis Abeba has approved a plan by the Water and Sewerage Authority (AAWSA) to build sewerage facilities at 21 sites at a cost of 80 million Br to service condominiums.
The sites are spread across Qirqos, Nefas Silk Lafto, Bole, Yeka and Gulele districts. The project will stretch a 16 km pipeline and 10 Anaerobic Baffled Reactor (ABR), which will store and purify the water. The destination will be the Qality-based waste water treatment plant, which has been operational for over eight years and has has a capacity of 7,500 cubic meters per day.
There is still a plan to install a pipeline by removing the ABR. MBR is the waste water treatment plant that is widely used for municipal and industrial waste water with a capacity to purify up to 48 million litres per day.The MBR costs more to install, poses a lot of technical adjustments, and is more time and labour consuming.
Sewrage treatment plants were selected since some of the sites are far from the Qality Sewrage Treatment Plant. It would have been impractical to lay a pipeline. The authority instead decided on installing on-site treatment plants at each condominium. It has the capacity of producing up to 2 to 200 cubic meter of water per day.
The financing of the project is the part of the annual budget approved by the Addis Abeba City Administration.
Next to road construction, the largest share of the city’s budget is allocated to the development of water infrastructure. In the current fiscal year, the city government has allocated 15.4pc (over five billion Br) of 35.4 billion Br of its budget to road infrastructure.
The authority has selected ABR rather than MBR (Membrane Bioreactor). Even though it has never installed the MBR sewerage treatment plant, it went through the pros and cons of using both products.
“We are using the ABR technology due to the cost analysis that we have made before going through the project. The ABR is cost efficient, less expensive and labour intensive,” said Suleiman Teyebe, communication director at Addis Abeba Water and Sewerage Authority.
The Qality Sewage Treatment Plant has been undergoing construction since 2008, and is 40pc completed. “Our plan this year is to have a 90pc progress in this project,” Suleiman told Fortune.” The success of the project is essential to have the pipeline set up at the condominium sites.”
The city’s nearly 3.3 million residents are estimated to discharge 200,000 cubic meter per day. The city has two waste water treatment plants- Kotebe and Qality . They have a capacity to handle close to 23,000 cubic meters of water. Qality and Kotebe treat over 22,800 cubic meters of water a day. This plants serve over 55,000 customers. The waste water management in Addis accounts for only 10 pc of total waste.
The construction for the Qality project was awarded to foreign construction companies, including Canadian, Belgian and Greece contractors with a 2.2 billion Br budget acquired from the World Bank. The Qality plant currently has pipelines stretching from Old airport to Qality. It is able to provide only 10pc service but, after the expansion it will have 62pc coverage and provide 7,500 cubic meters space to work on. The project is funded by World Bank, as a part of 150 million dollars loan approved by the bank four years ago.
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