The Water Authority of Fiji is in the process of developing a performance based contract to get some international expertise to work with and complement the Operation’s team in dealing with leaks after the CEO, Dr Amit Chanan, revealed that right now, we are losing about 60 million litres of water in leaks in a day.
While speaking on fijivillage Straight Talk with Vijay Narayan, Dr Chanan says their non-revenue water team budget is $3.5 million, and they need in access of $9 million to be able to stay at pace with fixing the rate at which those leaks are appearing.
He says they will be doing the performance base contract in 3 to 5 years, and the idea is to ramp up the focused effort on reducing leaks, and once we caught up, we can sustain it on an ongoing basis.
Dr Chanan says investment priority sometimes get forgotten when dealing with leaks, as most people only think about leaks when there is no water in their tap.
He adds if there were no leaks, Fiji would not have a water problem.
WAF Chief Operating Officer Seru Soderberg says it is a tough ask to reduce 47 percent of leakages as it’s a slow and steady process that will take a few years.
Soderberg had earlier highlighted that in Fiji for every 100 kilometres of pipelines, there are 300 leaks and for the same 100km of pipelines, they found 200 bursts.
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