Water treatment plant in Tanzania now complete

A multi-billion expansion project for the Upper Ruvu Water Treatment Plant in Tanzania to is now complete.

The completion of the water project would now enable the plant to produce 196 million litres of water daily up from only 82 million litres previously produced.

Eng Gerson Lwenge, the Minister for Water and Irrigation said that following the completion of the Water Treatment Plant in Tanzania, a total of 586 million litres of water would be produced for the city. He added that the Lower Ruvu Water Treatment Plant currently produces 390 million litres.

This implies that the total production will now be beyond the water requirement for the city which currently stands at around 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.

Power challenges

Howeve, he said the challenge was that the new water pumps installed at the Upper Ruvu Water Treatment plant required 400KV of electricity to run. This is  up from the current electricity of 200KV at the centre. He noted that there were plans to ensure that more power was made available in the next two months to operate the pumps.

The water plant project which is part of the augmentation of Dar es Salaam Water Supply Scheme that is funded by Exim Bank of India started on February 2014. The bank offered US$178 million for the expansion of the plant.

A total of US$39 million was spent on the expansion project of the Upper Ruvu alone. Additionally, US$59.3 million for the construction of the pipes and tanks to supply the water. But a big part of the money would now go towards funding the ongoing project of rehabilitating water supply network in the city.