Tamavua Water Treatment Plant provides 40% of Suva’s water supply

The Tamavua Water Treatment Plant is a critical infrastructure as it provides 40 percent of the water supply to Suva since each clarifier at the Water Authority of Fiji is 20 percent of Suva’s water supply.

The Water Authority of Fiji CEO, Doctor Amit Chanan, highlighted this during fijivillage Straight Talk with Vijay Narayan when questioned about how important is the Tamavua Water Treatment Plant infrastructure for the Authority.

The CEO says it is a very crucial treatment process particularly given that the biggest process that they do in terms of treating is addressing the turbidity challenge.

He says clarifiers are very important for treating turbid water.

Doctor Chanan says the designed capacity of the treatment is 60 million litres per day, but they have been consistently running it at about 75 million litres per day.

He says this is another reason why the turbidity ends up blocking the filtration since they are running the plant very hard.

He says engineering solutions can certainly assist with the treatment process, but they can not have heavy-duty engineering solutions until they have the backup from Viria in place because they can’t afford to take any component offline right now.

The CEO says the pipeline from Sawani to Colo-i-Suva is the first step before having heavy engineering solutions and in the meantime, they are looking at things like litter boom for Savura where the leaf litter and other organic litter ends up blocking the infrastructure, that is a cheaper and quicker implementation but the more complex side of things that they need to do is building another clarifier that will add to the capacity.

He further says they will also need to look at some filtration mechanism in terms of the intake at Savura such as building a new pumping station and filtration for Savura.

Chanan says all those are part and parcel of the Water Sector 2050 Strategy and are critical components of what they need to do to make sure the system that has already served more than 50 years has another 100 years to serve.