No extra water reserve facilities for city’s supply: Water PNG

WATER PNG does not have extra water reserve facilities to supply Port Moresby in the event of water disruptions from planned or unplanned outages, acting managing director Parkop Kurua says.
Kurua said the Port Moresby water treatment plant was built 25 years ago with the capacity to only serve a certain demand.
“At present, we don’t have redundancy so we can’t store and supply water when you put one system off,” he said.
“The capacity was to serve a certain population in the city. Over those 25 years, the city population has really grown.
“What we are generating at the moment at the production level is just going to the demand that we currently serve.
Kurua said that was a big challenge for Water PNG and Eda Ranu (now Port Moresby operations) at that time could not provide because cash flow was an issue then.
“Now that the company has merged with Water PNG, improving reliability in supply to the system is now one of our key aims,” he said.
“We want to build capacity to supply the demand and also to ensure that we have the redundancy.
“Plans are now underway and next year, we will be building another 100 million litres clarifier to provide that storage in the event of an outage.”