It�s 2020 for Molepolole sewerage system
Maranyane Ngwanaamotho | Friday October 31, 2014 15:31
According to Dedede the construction of the sewerage network will commence in January next year and is expected to end in January 2019. Defects notification period will run from January 2019 to July 2020.
Currently the project is at its infancy stage.
“The engineering consultant commenced the design review beginning of October after an award was made in July this year,” he said.
The almost P25 million project has been contracted to Haas JV for engineering supervision. Dedede said that their objective was to provide wastewater borne sewerage system to the entire village of Molepolole, which was not going to be easy.
“Because Molepolole is an already built up area, the issue of restricted working area and the high possibility of traversing occupied land will most likely cause delays and unexpected expenditure,” he said.
Also, as a built up area, there were already services in place with no ‘as built drawings’ hence a lot of interruptions expected during construction.
He said that Molepolole had a rocky terrain that would require blasting, which may cause delays and damage to properties, and consequently have financial implications.
Further, some areas within Molepolole have a high water table, which may likely cause problems during excavation prior to laying of pipes.
Dedede said that Molepolole was the largest urban village in the country in terms of size as it recorded a populace of 66,466 during the 2011 census and had an estimated annual growth of 2.17 percent.
Water consumption was estimated at 133,554m3 per month.
But as with most villages in the country, the water demands were extremely high and the current supply was inadequate.
He said that there were plans to augment the water supply in Molepolole from the North-South water carrier.
“This, however, does not take away from the fact that water is a scarce commodity in Botswana that is anticipated to be even more so in the coming years,” he said.
According to Dedede, existing sanitation facilities in Molepolole comprised of on-site facilities such as pit latrines, septic tanks, and off-site wastewater treatment works comprising of wastewater stabilisation ponds.
Only institutions are connected to the centralised wastewater treatment works, and 80 percent of all households with waterborne sanitation were connected to septic tanks, he said.
“There are two wastewater stabilisation treatment works in Molepolole.
The Prison complex treatment works has a design wastewater treatment capacity of 50m3 per day and the council works has 345m3 per day,” he said, adding that council works were currently organically and hydraulically overloaded receiving in excess of 400m3 per day of wastewater from various institutions.
The treated effluent is discharged to an adjacent river. The quality of the effluent does not comply with the DWA discharge guidelines, he said.
The prison treatment works were taken over by the district council in 2001 for operation and maintenance. The effluent from the works is disposed into an infiltration area.
“Potential exists for the treated effluent to be used for irrigating citrus, and fodder crops and so forth,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Water Utilities Corporation recently urged all households in Gaborone to connect to the network and discontinue the use of pit latrines and septic tanks.
This was after the corporation completed the construction of a sewerage system in Gaborone including the SHAA areas of Broadhurst, Extension 14, Bontleng, White City and Old Naledi.