People residing in Suva-Nausori areas will continue to face intermittent water supply.
Water Authority of Fiji chief operating officer Seru Soderberg said the water level in the Waimanu River, the source of raw water for the Waila Treatment Plant, was still below the critical level.
“The significant rain event on the 15th is actually registered as a significant spike in the level of the river. However, within three days, we were back to critical level,” Mr Soderberg said.
“We’ve been able to sustain as much as possible but yesterday (Sunday), our critical level within the river is back under the critical levels below 0.8 metres.
“Then, in terms of flow, the critical flow for Waimanu raw intake and Waila raw intake is on 250 mega litres a day. The rain that’s happening has provided some relief, but it hasn’t really taken us over the threshold we need.
“And again, as I stated the rain events on the 15th and the 16th is also captured as significant rainfall into the catchment that has helped us but unfortunately within three days, we’re right back to where we were initially.”
He said WAF required 173 million litres of water on a daily basis in order to meet everybody’s demand, but they were only able to produce 170 million mega litres.
“In terms of our current situation, we require around 173 million litres of water on a daily basis in order to meet everybody’s demand and if we are able to produce 173, that also means that there is no intermittent supply.
“In terms of our production capacity, we are only able to produce around 170 million mega litres.
“The shortfall of three mega litres is what is going to be addressed by the Viria project, which is expected to be completed this year.
“In terms of our volume of extraction, at the moment, we are only able to extract around 163 million litres a day out of our sources.
“And in terms of our treatment, we’re producing around 155 million litres a day which is a significant difference to the 173 that we are having.
“That is why we still have the prohibition notice that’s out there,” Mr Soderberg said.
“We still doing water carting, we also doing water rationing for Sakoca, Princes Rd, Colo-i-Suva areas and some customers in elevated areas out in the Lami area, they will be facing intermittent supply because of above operations that we’ve had to do.
“Valve operations is quite a critical component of the work that we do now to build reservoir levels especially in the evenings.
“We are trying our best to build reservoir levels to be healthy enough in the morning, so that customers actually receive some supply with pressure.
“In saying that we’re also looking at some other mitigating works that we’re currently doing by basically building up coffer dams, installing additional pumps to try and increase inflow into our treatment plant.”
Mr Soderberg said the volume of water that they could safely extract from the Waimanu River was also monitored.
“We don’t really want to pull everything out of the river that the river itself becomes dry because there are locals that we have to consider. The community use this river that we are extracting from, as a source of food for them.”
Mr Soderberg also highlighted the intermittent supply areas in the Suva-Nausori corridor.
“These customers receive disrupted water supply. They would get some level of supply during certain time of the day but they will not be able to get 24 hours supply.
“In Suva-Nausori area, there is a lot of area that is covered under our intermittent supply area which is Lokia, Koronivia, Nakasi, Davuilevu, Nadera, Davuilevu Housing. We also have Coloi-Suva and Dokanaisuva, up in Delainavesi, Waiqanake out in Veisari.
“These are some of our intermittent supply areas. In a lot of these areas, the impact of our operation is being felt by these customers when we carry out operations.
“Our operational hours are in the evening. We cannot run operations from around 7pm onwards until around 10:30, and we do our reversals from around 4am.
“But within the day, we also do carry out our operations at around 10am. So, some customers would be facing some pressure issues, supply issues during this period.”
