Planning and maintenance crucial

THERE would be no need for power or water outages anywhere around the country, if asset maintenance kept up with asset usage and planning kept up with actual population expansion.
These two issues, lack of maintenance and planning, are at the heart of many of today’s problems.
Indeed, airports, sea ports, jetties, roads and bridges, buildings, fencing, swimming pools and just about any other facility require regular maintenance.
At the same time, they require regular expansion to match increasing demands on them by growing populations and industries.
When they are not planned for, when they are not regular items in budgets, there is a guarantee the service will fail.
Or there will arrive a time when the facility is at its maximum capacity and cannot provide any more even if there is excess demand.
Water, power, roads and other services in Port Moresby were designed in the pre-independence era for a maximum population of 40,000.
The population has burgeoned out about 1 million today.
The Sirinumu Dam was commissioned in 1963 to supply water and power to Port Moresby, the same year that the Yonki Dam was to supply power to Madang, Lae and the highlands provinces.
The highlands highway was planned to run alongside the power pylons through these locations.
The total population of the entire highlands was about 1 million then but would now multiplied many times over.
So it is not just about replacing aging equipment but about expanding capacity to meet the increased demands.
It is small wonder that there is power and water load shedding everywhere and endless traffic jams and major centres.
Even if there was enough water supply at the source, the pipes would be too small to carry the required capacity.
Even if a power generating plant produced the amount of electricity required for the city, some of the power lines would not be able to carry the higher voltage traffic required today because the existing lines just are not designed to carry that load.
Then, there is the matter of back up or alternate sources.
If Sirinumu was commissioned in the 60s, by any stretch of the imagination, it is impossible that it can serve the same purposes.
The dam would be too small to serve both water and hydro power generation needs of Port Moresby.
In any case, in PNG one must always have a backup plan for when the frustrated landowner strikes.
How many times has Port Moresby been brought to its knees by the Koiari people? Yet the leadership never learns.
Brown River a far bigger river, no farther than Sirinumu, was always there but nobody gave it a thought as an alternate source of power generation or water for the city until most recently.
The story of this lack of foresight is to be found everywhere there is a problem.
In East Sepik provincial headquarters, Wewak, PNG Power awaits equipment for maintenance.
Did it need to wait until the power plant shut down before placing the order?
Lorengau on Manus is on power load shedding for fuel shortage.
But fuel shortage in the country has been ongoing since the Foreign Exchange crisis in around 2016.
By now a solar power grid could have gone up to compliment the diesel power plant.
The Australian government could have been approached for assistance to power the town when the refugees were still incarcerated there.
It is too late now.
Everywhere we look, lack of regular maintenance or lack of forward planning blow up costs and invites all manner of problems.
The Department of Works and Highway once announced that the maintenance bill equaled the estimates for new land transport infrastructure.
It behooves government to give serious thought to planning and maintenance.